Norman Adams, original oil painting: Three Pheasants, “Beyond Freedom.” Oil 24x36. Prints.

 There is only one Freedom. And it is the pure Spiritual Freedom to be free of the Ego, “all the values of Outside.”

To the little-ego that we call mind-body, however, this Spiritual Freedom is unimaginable. So to the little-ego this freedom masquerades as two false-freedoms: the false-freedom to be different, like male and female (the above pheasant roosters and hen); and then the false-freedom to fight for it, or over it, like sex. And these two false-freedoms define the chaos and turmoil that is the ego until darkness, roots, death and decay below kill the ego to leave the Freedom that an ego called mind-body cannot imagine -- the ego-free Freedom, Creativity, that created the painting, for its OWN Reward, Heaven-inside, Atman. 

Beyond the ego’s freedom is Atman. Atman is a strange word to Language because it makes words like “Heaven, Creativity and Freedom”  feel at Home only when they are Inside, when Language insists that they are Outside.

 If  Norman Rockwell set the modern stage for this Atman Art with his painting of “The Problem We All Live With”  then Norman Adams is just playing his role for Atman Art to reach new levels with his wildlife paintings like this painting of three pheasants, “Beyond Freedom.” 

The Magic Realism that for over five-decades Norman Adams obsessively perfected for his Still Life paintings and illustrations takes his Atman Art to new levels with his animal-wildlife art. No matter how good the images, prints, of these paintings appear they do not come close to the feelings in the originals that go beyond the word magic, in Magic Realism, into the only word that can describe it: the Creativity that is its Own Reward, Heaven-inside, Atman, Atman Art.