Selected Works 1956-2022
John Adams began painting as a teenager and is still creating art seventy years later.
The works in this special exhibition span every decade of John’s career from 1956 through to 2022.
He is known for working in a variety of styles depending on his mood and the nature of his subject matter. The Australian landscape offers endless inspiration and freedom for his mind to explore possibilities. He feels a spiritual connection to landscape, a sense of oneness which he attempts to express with love.
In his diary of 1955 John wrote ...” Cezanne’s approach owes much to a harmony of colour patches, an analysis of planes as a means of retaining structure and transforming pictorial order. Nature as the basis for an orderly and harmonious arrangement of paint on a surface-not as a means of imitating nature. I can’t do this, at least not yet.” (April 1955).
For a period in his life during the 60s John was known to his friends as “John Spon”, due to a series of handcrafted satirical booklets done in collaboration with the late artist Robert Rooney, which are now in the archives of the National Gallery of Victoria. One might infer a dichotomy between love of nature and a series of the absurd.
Despite occasional doubt, John is buoyed by the elusive hope that one day he will paint “his masterpiece”. In the meantime, he has won numerous awards beginning with the Camden Art Prize at the Victorian Artists’ Society in 1963.
John’s work can be seen at the Leeson Street Gallery, 38 Leeson Street Cowes.
Opening Sunday, October 30, 2pm-4pm. Runs until Sunday November 13.
Exhibition hours: 11am to 3pm daily. Closed Tuesdays.
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