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Frank Adams - artist, illustrator, master craftsman

Frank Adams is 82 years old and still actively painting, whilst enjoying life in Devon in his home down by the river Exe in Topsham.

“I’m so lucky that I still have a steady hand and good eyesight” note*

With the help of his son Paul acting as his manager, he is now producing limited edition print runs of his paintings.
These are superb quality giclée prints on Arches paper. (the same paper as the original watercolour paintings).
They are in extremely lightfast inks faithfully reproducing the subtleties of the original watercolours.

He is actually a retired craftsman, his main occupation being signwriting, following in a family tradition of 4 generations. His skills include the dying arts of gilding, coach painting and French polishing, amongst others.He has sign written everything from vans to narrow boats and planes, restored the authentic livery on a horse drawn London bus, hand painted pure gold coach lines on a fleet of vintage cars including a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, and even gilded a cockerel in situ on top of a tall church spire. He is used to working very large but is also capable of small fine detail, illustrating products in photo-realistic style on the side of large vehicles at one end of the scale and graphics for advertising and publishing at the other. He also regularly produces hand made cards for family and friends using fine calligraphic lettering in designs of his own.

Despite all of this he has no formal qualifications but he did train at the Manchester School of Art from the age 14 to 16. He passed entrance exams to go to the senior school, but unfortunately war broke out. He continued ‘night’ school which was only open during daylight hours at weekends to avoid bombing. He had a short stint at Edinburgh college of Art and Derby College of Art whilst stationed in the army. He exhibited at the Manchester Academy of Fine Art at the age of 18. Then in the 1950’s for three years running had pictures exhibited there, but eventually stopped because of their move away from representational purity. “ What I value is what I see and I am not especially
concerned with mood or emotions in my paintings.” He is equally at home with watercolour and oil techniques and has perfected a delightful technique of direct drawing with a pen. With this he works outwards from the centre of interest instead of laying out the composition first. This really does require skill, as mistakes cannot be removed and proportions and perspective can easily go awry. He is inspired by detail and feels that drawing is his forte. He likes to use a camera as a sketchbook but does not slavishly copy the photographs, preferring to re-interpret using a little artistic licence. The result is that he produces pictures with a magic of their own. For example, he recently painted the head of a racehorse on the side of a horsebox and despite using a very poor reference (a 5 x 4" photograph of the whole horse!), someone actually recognised the horse from the likeness he had captured. Franks’ work is already treasured in private collections around the UK and USA (California, Texas and Georgia), but now using the very latest digital techniques of scanning and printing his paintings are reaching an even wider audience.

Paul Frank Adams (the artists' son)

*note:despite recently having a cateract operation