‘And the sun drips honey’

pAiNTiNGS bY

RiCHARd AdAMS

‘The Village’ detail

LANGHAM GALLERY6th - 17th November 2012

Richard Adams' paintings celebrate diverse

aspects of the English countryside with a wry

comic charge and an incisive, sometimes

uproariously offbeat attention to details and

idiosyncrasies of village life. born in Hampshire

in 1960, Adams grew up in Wiltshire on a

modern housing estate in an historic village

close to the Marlborough downs. A good deal of

his childhood was spent pleasurably roaming

local sites such as the Avebury stone circle (just

up the road) and ruins of wartime bases and

camps; he relished many an unsupervised, Just

William-like day building dens (and consuming

rudimentary picnics) in ancient woodlands,

which he considered as a kind of playground.

'Growing up in the seventies', he says, 'it was a

time of great change and disregard for the past.

Wonderful antique buildings were demolished

and made way for new developments. All the

cows went black and white, and the pigs and

hens were shut away. The local farms became

more mechanised. The tractors got huge, and the

soil was spread with nitrogen pellets.

'i never gave it much of a thought, and spent

most of my childhood watching TV and reading.

but for about fifteen years from the age of about

eighteen onwards – when i left to live in

Leicester (studying illustration at the polytechnic

there), then settling in London (working as a

freelance illustrator) until 1994 (when i moved

to live in Rye in Sussex) – i started getting a

terrible gnawing melancholy for the things that

had passed and gone.

'This maybe informs some of my pictures. A

craving for halcyon days but in accepting they

are gone, giving oneself an enormous licence to

go on vast flights of fancy when depicting such

things.

‘No era is specific in my pictures; the stories are

all open-ended, unresearched, gleefully thrown

together but hopefully making entertaining

images with an enchanting variety of details.'

He says that 'a huge part of my subject matter is

looking over my shoulder at an idealised past,

probably pre-1960 – before i was born and

around to take proper notes!' He describes

'A Subtle light-heArtedneSS': THE pAiNTiNGS OF RiCHARd AdAMS

working in his studio now with his current

picture-in-progress 'in the middle of a great mass

of chalk pastels and reference books and

coloured pencils'. A constant source of narrative

inspiration are the 'few simple stories his

grandparents use to tell' him about life in rural

Hampshire after the First World War. One

grandfather – who ran a newsagents at Denmead

(the new part of whose high street was initially

made up from abandoned, ramshackle railway

carriages), and was also part-time sign painter

(making signs for the side of vans, rather like

that of Jones the Butcher in Dad's Army) – told

stories of wandering over the fields in the

summertime; this was Laurie Lee-like territory.

My other grandfather was a carpenter. My

grandparents worked itinerantly on farms during

the school holidays.'

Adams was 'quite a reader as a child'. Reading a

plethora of cheap adventure stories and books

such as the kitschly illustrated Pan Book of

Horror Stories, fired his imagination. By the age

of twelve he was reading books such as

Watership Down (1982), the epic, picaresque

adventure story by his namesake, and William

Golding's first novel Lord of the Flies (1954).

Today, incidents in his paintings are sometimes

inspired, he says, by suddenly-recalled 'passages

in novels and little evocative snippets in books'.

A recent example of the latter was hearing Edna

O'Brien reading from one of her novels on Radio

Four; her description of a young married woman

putting her coat on and running out of the house

past houses and an autumnal bonfire, stayed in

his mind, and went on to help animate an

incident in one of his paintings.

He is inspired variously by 'books and films and

music'. The scene in the 1953 film Genevieve

(starring Kenneth More and Kay Kendall as one

of two couples comically involved in the London

to Brighton veteran car run) – when a character

cooks a breakfast of bacon and eggs on a shovel

placed over part of a steam engine – was an

especially memorable one for him. Other diverse

influences include childhood Sunday afternoons

spent watching charmingly amusing old black-

and-white films on television, starring the likes

of Margaret Rutherford and Alec Guinness, and

then being glued to the thrillingly futuristic 60s'

TV puppet show, Thunderbirds. He says he

'cherry-picks' historical references for his

paintings: for example, an old dress or fabric

pattern glimpsed in a charity shop, countless

images of old steam engines, train, traction

engines, vintage cars and historic windmills

which he enthusiastically peruses and ponders.

In his painting The Village, an old thatched

cottage, a weathered ancient church and a manor

house are juxtaposed alongside a beautifully

curvaceous Morris Minor car, a naked couple

mischievously planted on top of a hayrick

carried along by horse-and-cart, a pig in a

wheelbarrow, two frightfully proper-looking

vicars being incongruously transported on a

rickety handcart, a tomato-red tractor and a

Richard's great-aunty Ruby, and friends.

Richard's great-grandfather being brought his

lunch during a hard day in the fields.

liberally puffing steam engine. Amidst such

fecund, jovial imagery, there is not a hint of

modern life post-1960 (the year Adams was

born), certainly no trace, he says, of 'a

contemporary Barratt house or an iPad or

iPhone, and all that malarkey – none of that is

going into my pictures!'

A seminal moment for him was seeing the great

Stanley Spencer Retrospective at the Royal

Academy in 1980. He delightedly found a copy

of the exhibition catalogue in a second-hand

shop a couple of years ago. In Spencer, Adams

found 'the mentor I was looking for, an

imaginative figurative artist who spent his life

painting pictures, and who painted a whole

world based mainly on his life in an English

village'. Other artists he admires include Dame

Laura Knight, and turn-of-the-last-century

Cornish painters such as Lamorna Birch and

Stanhope Forbes. He also appreciates aspects of

the Bloomsbury Group, the paintings of Dora

Carrington (though not so much those of Duncan

Grant and Vanessa Bell). What he likes about the

Bloomsbury participants is 'the idea they convey

of the artist's life; in some of my pictures, a

naked bohemian model is being sketched, whilst

in the corner someone is casually writing a

novel'.

Adams highlights the admixture of fun and

frustration that underlies the making of a picture.

'I think on my feet, applying the chalk pastel to

paper though I rub and scrape out more than I

put in. I use pencil to delineate the details. The

figures in my pictures are purely imaginary –

there is one quizzical-looking young girl who

frequently recurs; the characters are not

autobiographical or based on, say, my own

children. I identify with authors who say when

they write a character's part, it just takes off, and

goes off in its own dynamic way. The main thing

is that I'm not a surrealist; my pictures are not

based on dreams. My shapes – like the barrage

balloon contours that my clouds often assume –

are only one step away from reality; as such, they

are not weird at all. I don't take myself over-

seriously as an artist. What characterises my

work above all is a subtle light-heartedness.'

PHILIP VANN

(Philip Vann is author of Face to Face: British

Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century. His latest

books are The Adorable Plot (based on Tessa

Newcomb's paintings and writings on

allotments; published by Sansom & Co), and

Keith Vaughan (Lund Humphries Publishers).

He lives in Cambridge.)

Richard's great-grandfather and great-uncle at their newsagents, between the boot

repairers and the hairdressers. All these shops were made from old railway carriages.

‘Seen from a Train’ Varnished Pastel 10” x 12”

‘The Village’ Varnished Pastel 23” x 32”

‘On the Beach’ Varnished Pastel 8” x 8”

‘Water Lillies’ Varnished Pastel 8” x 8”

‘The Mill Pond’ Varnished Pastel 12” x 16”

‘County Show’ Varnished Pastel 20” x 28”

‘The Pie’ Varnished Pastel 10” x 12”

‘Church Meadow’ Varnished Pastel 12” x 16”

‘Steam Folk ’ Varnished Pastel 17” x 24”

‘The Harvest’ Varnished Pastel 23” x 32”

‘The Vegetable Patch’ Varnished Pastel 8” x 8”

‘Apple Gathering’ Varnished Pastel 8” x 8”

‘Family Gathering’ Varnished Pastel 20” x 28”

‘Summer is a-coming in’ Varnished Pastel 17” x 24”

Day of These Days

by Laurie Lee

Such a morning it is when love

leans through geranium windows

and calls with a cockerel’s tongue.

When red-haired girls scamper like roses

over the rain-green grass;

and the sun drips honey.

Richard Adams has been

much inspired by the poems

and novels of Laurie Lee. in

1986 Adams won first-prize

in a Reader’s digest

competition, for which he

made eight illustrations for

Laurie Lee’s novel ‘Cider

with rosie’ - which itself

went on to become the title

for a 2008 painting by

Adams.

Laurie Lee with Richard Adams

‘Cider with Rosie’ Varnished Pastel 2008

RONA AT bLOOMSbuRY

LANGHAM GALLERY34 Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC1N 3LE

e. info@langhamgallery.com t. 020 7242 0010

Mon - Fri 10am - 6pm Sat.10am - 4pm

‘Cabbage Pickers’ Varnished Pastel 10” x 12”