When he is not playing the jazz violin, Richard Adams considers himself an abstract painter. He draws his inspiration from nature, colours, textures, shapes, surfaces and remembering these, he can at a later date produce them with feeling on canvas. He likes his work to have a certain amount of spontaneity to it. This helps him feel that he is the guide of the brush rather than the master.
Richard first exhibited his paintings in 1982 in Wellington, New Zealand. Since then, the Auckland based artist has become nationally and internationally renowned for his work, exhibiting in Tokyo, Sydney, New York, London, Hong Kong and Dubai, as well as locally.
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.”
