Richard Adams

These works that were made on location during my time at the Karekare residency in June 2021 are based on my continued love of landscape and fascination with different horizons. Whether they are land or sea or man-made, I am constantly looking towards the meeting of light and dark, or sea and land and what lies beyond. Having the time to be immersed in the landscape at Karekare enabled me to see the ever-changing mood and light over a prolonged period. The extraordinary light and landscape night and day in Karekare makes one feel as if you are inside the light and looking out. 

Behind the Scenes - I consider myself an abstract painter. I draw my inspiration from nature, colours, textures, shapes, surfaces and remembering these I can, at a later date, produce them with feeling onto paper or canvas. I like my work to have a certain amount of spontaneity
to it. This helps me in feeling that I am the guide of the brush rather than the master. I try not to have a preconception of what the picture will look like, I'll pick a certain size of canvas, deal with the necessary materials and then let an image grow from there. 

Born in London in 1957, Richard Adams first exhibited his paintings in 1982 in Wellington. Since then, the Auckland based artist and accomplished jazz violinist has become nationally and internationally renowned for his work, exhibiting in Tokyo, Sydney, New York, London, Hong Kong and Dubai, as well as locally.
Richard Wolfe comments on Adams’ paintings, "If abstract art can be fitted into two general categories, depending on whether its elements are derived from either natural or entirely non-representational forms, then Adams' work hovers somewhere in between." While Adams initially takes his inspiration from the subtle colours, radiant horizons and fine geometry of landscapes, rather than paint these directly, he consigns them to memory, allowing them to morph gently through filters of time and feeling before emerging onto canvas or paper. Surfaces are important and evocative in Adams' work, inspired by the effects of nature on man-made things like rust, weathering, dirt, dust and decay. Adams' surfaces are constructions of layer upon layer of paint, showing through like faint shadows, or glimpsed through scratches and scrapes. Hamish Coney writes, "There is a softness, a sort of frescoed approach to the choice of colour and surface treatment that enable the monumental blocks of the work to relate internally with a wonderful elasticity of weight."