James Newton Adams

James Adams was born in 1971. After completing a degree in Fine Art (Sculpture), James started up his own business in London designing and making metal furniture and products for the retail market as well as undertaking various private commissions from architectural ironwork through to product design and sculpture, teaching himself the rudiments of Blacksmithing along the way.

By late 2004 and after running a wrought iron curtain pole business in London, James decided to return to his roots in sculpture and painting and set up a workshop & painting studio based on the Isle of Skye.
Working as a sculptor and painter, I explore my experience of the land and seascapes of Scotland as well as the people, animals and objects that inhabit them, often highlighting tensions in their relationships with each other and with the landscape itself. I work from memories of such places, drawing upon a narrative within. This allows me to build a composition around a theme - the title will as often inform the work as the other way round. The perspectives in my work are the perspectives of memory, in which different stages of a narrative may be seen simultaneously or a scene may be viewed from above as if in a dream or a map.
 
Artist Statement
 

This collection of new paintings is an invitation to look through the eyes of the characters in a created world.  Many of the paintings begin as compositions of elements in an environment, be it landscape, cityscape, or interior, from which the characters and their stories develop as the paint is laid on.  Sometimes as the story evolves, a feedback occurs in which the elements of the painting need to be moved around the canvas, so that the final work comprises successive layers of underpainting of which only ghosts remain.

In my recent paintings I have been working with a wider range of colours and textures to give life to a specific memory be it of moonlight, lamplight or daylight.  I use white paint to build up textures so that the world I am creating sometimes appears frosted, highlighting the isolation of the figures and the presence they evoke in an unspecified space.

Many of the works are about difficult or intimate moments but at the same time this is leavened with humour and sympathy