Michael Adams (painter)

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Michael Adams (born December 29, 1937 in Malaysia ) is an English painter.

Life

Michael Adams was born in Malaysia in 1937, the son of a rubber planter and an opera singer. From the age of 9 he was taught in England. At the age of 16 he attended Falmouth Art School and from 1958 to 1961 the Royal College of Art in London. There he studied with Julian Trevellyan. After completing his studies as an engraver, Adams worked as a teacher at Makerere University in Uganda until 1965 and then decided to work as a freelance artist.

In 1971 he met the Englishwoman Heather Denselow, who was teaching at a primary school in Nairobi . They moved to the Seychelles in 1972 and got married that same year. Their son Tristan was born in 1977 and daughter Alyssa in 1980. Like their father, both became artists and together exhibit their pictures in the gallery attached to the house in Mahé on the Seychelles.

In 2001 he was awarded the title MBE by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to the arts in the Seychelles .

Manner and style

The painter Michael Adams is often referred to in the media as "the Gauguin of the Seychelles". Just as the former retired to Tahiti and then to the Marquesas island of Hiva-Oa after an eventful life, Adams found his refuge on Mahé, the main island of the Seychelles, in 1972 after long years of wandering mostly through Africa.

Michael Adams also recalls Paul Gauguin in two other ways . They seek their intuitions in untouched nature and in the simple local life, where "everything still means innocence and freedom" (Encyclopaedia Universalis). And both overcome the form-dissolving painting of Impressionism through the extreme luminosity of the colors used.

Despite these similarities, the result of their art is fundamentally different. With Gauguin, the colors are divided into areas, which has had a great influence on symbolism and expressionism. With Michael Adams, on the other hand, they flow like an untamed, bubbling stream. The occasional gold used by Adams is reminiscent of Friedensreich Hundertwasser , with whom Adams was loosely friends for three decades. They met in Uganda in 1968 and exchanged ideas about their art. But while the Austrian Art Nouveau shines through in Hundertwasser's abstract pictures, Adams delves into the shapes and colors of nature in his own language (he paints almost exclusively with watercolors).

Accordingly, Adam's style cannot be assigned to any known styles. Such things are of no importance to him either. He goes his own way and seems hidden in his tropical wilderness, which he rarely leaves for a trip. He lives off the sale of his screen prints, which his wife Heather organizes in her small island gallery. Because he can only part with the originals as an exception. “After all, you don't sell your children either,” he argues with the result that his pictures are hard to find on the art market.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klaus Eichmüller: Seychelles: Jedem seine Paradies , stuttgarter-nachrichten.de, September 10, 2012, accessed on July 24, 2015
  2. ^ Robert Goldwater in 'Paul Gauguin', Paris 1957; Encyclopaedia Universalis, Paris 'Gauguin'
personal data
SURNAME Adams, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English painter
DATE OF BIRTH December 29, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Malaysia