JAMES NEWTON ADAMS

THE LUNATICS

COVER IMAGE

The Lunatics JAMES NEWTON ADAMS

acrylic on canvas | 51cm x 76cm

+44 (0) 1463 783 230

art@kilmorackgallery.co.uk

Kilmorack Gallery, Inverness-shire iv4 7al SCOTLAND

JAMES NEWTON ADAMS

THE LUNATICS

AUGUST 2024

TheTwitcher

acrylic on canvas | 76cm x 51cm

Initially, I thought it best to call James Newton Adam’s painting of people looking up at the stars ‘Night Sky.’ James’ given title ‘Lunatics’ seemed negative. But that night, after a dreamy sleep, I arose with the conviction that it is good to look up and that the moon’s influence can only be a good thing. More wisdom will be found from gazing up at the stars than down at your shoes. ‘It’s nice to be a lunatic,’ Ian Dury sang - and they/we should be celebrated… so the title ‘The Lunatics’ remains, and I see it as positive and painted with love for both people and the heavens.

I also thought of calling this small catalogue ‘Observations from a Quiet Place.’ Observation is key to all artists’ work and James Newton Adams lives in a quieter place than most - past Elgol on the Isle of Skye, and onto a further crumbling singletrack road that eventually descends to a lair which overlooks the sea with Tarskavaig beyond. It is an outpost – quiet and distant – an alternate to London where Adams studied and spent time. Quiet places bring their own clarity, their own lunacy, and their own connection to a bigger existence. I see this in Newton Adams’ work - the feeling of observing a world where the folly that makes us human is kept close enough to be felt, and just far enough away to be observed. Love, sin and belief create mini operas and stories to be painted. We are all lunatics… so I called this catalogue ‘Lunatics’ too.

There are clear inspirations from past artists in Newton Adams’ work – Bellany, Chadwick, Lowry, Wallis and others - and these are homages grown from respect and understanding. The streets scenes of L.S. Lowry morph into a day in the Edinburgh fringe and the crammed-in life of a busy harbour. Adams understands that characters should be placed where they are compositionally most effective and that realism is not as important as expression. Faces in this new body of work are often painted with intentional quickness, creating eyes and mouths that are little more than blobs, but these simple marks express more emotion and more directional gaze than ever. We feel every character. The naive self-taught Alfred Wallis is another inspiration to Newton Adams. There is even a wall of Wallace’s prints at the top of Adams’ staircase, and we spent a while discussing their brilliance. Wallis painted what he knew – the sea, Cornwall and boats with their rigging – and he fitted moments remembered from his life into paintings without the constraints of academic realism. Wallis’s work wasn’t abstract and separate from lives, but grew directly from it and he intuitively knew what worked in a painting. Adams’ paintings come from the same place. His figures, sheep and villages grow from the land. They are not placed into it but are part of the landscape with all elements are bound together. In ‘Fisherman’s Blues,’ perspective is cast off so we can revel in the shapes and colours that make up this painting, and it is far from naïve. Shape, colour, and

line bring balance to this scene even if a boat is stern heavy. Like Wallis, Adams paints what he knows. In Adam’s case it is life in Skye, memories of London and trips south. They are observations of the lives we live, made with a wry smile.

The dozen paintings in this catalogue all give the feeling of a richness in life. Relationships are everywhere and in many forms: the twitcher with his birds, dynamics between the six figures in the hustler’s pub, the cat waking her owner, a frenzied crowd at Speaker’s Corner, a farmer and the crows and lovers walking together. All life in Adam’s work is alive and, like in ‘The Lunatics,’ they are experiencing the world together. It might be a little out-of-control like the white horse in ‘Blair Atholl Horse Trials’ but life in these paintings is ecstatic. It feels very human, even the non-humans feel human, and Adams’ colours and resolved compositions speak of something more - of beauties that are hard to name and things seen but not noted. It is good to look up sometimes and feel the music of the spheres.

Tony Davidson, Director of Kilmorack Gallery