Adam Straus, a native Floridian who studied painting at Florida State University, has been creating “beautiful and disturbing” landscape paintings for more than twenty-five years. Straus has the sensitivity of a poet and the ironic vision of a satirist, whose works of art inspire contradictory emotions, from open-mouthed wonder, and somber tears, to silly grins. "The artist has a responsibility to show and tell the truth," Straus asserts, while refraining from preaching a simplistic message in his work. The landscape paintings selected for Straus’s Vero Beach exhibition often have a mysterious quality that allows viewers to plenty of room for interpretation.