This was a joint exhibition, featuring a small selection of illustrative and fantastical work from Tony Adams collection, book covers from the Agatha Christie novels that had been unseen for many years, scene paintings from Flash Gordon alongside work from his son Jon Adams, a Marine Archeologist who paints to allow others to visualise and feel the shipwrecks so central to his research... TOM ADAMS - UNCOVERED FOREWORD - extract from JOHN FOWLES’ introduction to Tom Adams’ Agatha Christie Cover Story: “...(Adams is a) blender of acute realism and haunting fantasy...a painstaking craftsman with a special genius for suiting image to a story...His secret as cover illustrator lies, it seems to me, above all in his capacity for being oblique, yet so presenting this obliquity that it constitutes a lure. TOM ADAMS - UNCOVERED JON ADAMS - UNDERWATER
Agatha Christie covers
Agatha Christie covers
Tom Adams - The Moving Finger
Tom Adams -
The Thin Red Line
Tom Adams -
They Do It Mirrors
Tom Adams -
Halloween Party
Tom Adams - The Collector
 
Tom Adams - Ghost Story
Tom Adams - Princess Aura's Bedroom (Flash Gordon Study)
Tom Adams - The Vivisector
Tom Adams -
Halloween Party
Jon Adams - Osteregothland
 
Jon Adams - Jungfrun
Jon Adams - Elefanten
Jon Adams - Ricksapplet
31st March to 6th May 2007
“Novels must always remain primarily their texts; and the jacket must always, I suppose, be mainly classed as a part of the selling process, the luring of the potential customer in side the covers (though only fools and the very highbrow imagine that the luring and selling stop at the printed page). Yet it seems to me that creating a good pictorial jacket for fiction - a glance in any bookseller’s window on either side of the Atlantic will, alas, prove how rare an achievement this remains - is something more than the purely commercial art which is how too many publishers still view it. At its best it requires gifts beyond mere ingenuity, calculation, flair. It will show an independence of mind in the artist - an ability to hold author, text and publisher (and their often chasing demands) at arms length, and to find a truly personal solution. I know how hard Tom has fought on occasion to keep this independence of feeling and vision; an obstinacy that is matched in his studio by the enormous care he takes to achieve the effects he wants...his work...belongs to one of the pleasantest traditions in English art, and goes back essentially to the great woodcut school of the 1860’s; and desends through Rackham, Dulac, the Detmold brothers to our own day...” JON ADAMS - UNDERWATER Johnathan Adams is an archeologist who paints. An archeologists sources include everything created or affected by past human action: from the smallest residues, the smallest things made, to the greatest monuments and the landscape itself. The traditional illustrations of archeology are line drawings and photographs, these days augumented with various reconstructions drawn, modelled or computed. Adam’s paintings move beyond these formal constraints although the goal is still representational. In this, he follows archoloegist painters such as Heywood Sumner and Philip Baker but his area of specialism is the underwater enclave of maritime archeology where he uses art to visualise the shipwreck sites so central to his research. The first of these is Henry VIII’s Mary Rose and it was here that he began experimenting with freehand drawing underwater. ‘Imagine a dark, amorphous structure, heeled over at 60 degrees, festooned in seaweed, incomplete and only partially exposed, in which there isn’t a single flat surface, straight edge or right angle. Even if you could visually unscramble it, remembering it when you got to the surface was impossible. The cameras of the time were often little use in the turbid water and low light levels, so I drew. Not only were these sketches ‘worth a thousand words’ in writing up to the dive, I also found that if I could draw it, I understood it. And as I worked among those massive oak timbers fashioned by Tudor shipwrights, I became increasingly fascinated by the ship rather then its contents: the ship as artefact - embodying tradition, technology, innovation, aesthetics, ideology, aspiration. In short, society itself.’ The majority of the collection represents Adam’s long involvement in Swedish maritime archeology where, together with his work on Mary Rose and Sea Venture, several Baltic wrecks provided case studies for his doctorial thesis at Stockholm University. Jon Adams is the Director of the University of Southampton’s Centre for Martime Archeology and has research projects in several countries.
 
The Magnus - Tom Adams
Born in 1926, Rhode Island, USA into a family of architects and town planners. After leaving the Navy in 1946, Adams trained at Chelsea School of Art and Goldsmiths college, London between 1946-50, graduating in Fine Art. Between 1953-60 Adam’s wrote and illustrated Regimental Histories for Eagle, and various features on natural history for Eagle, Girl and Swift published by Hulton Press. In 1958 he founded Adam’s Design Associates, producing large murals in laminated plastic for various companies. During this time he was represented by Virgil Pomfret, highly regarded agent and long-standing friend, through Virgil he began his career as a book cover illustrator notably for the early John Fowles’ novels The Collector, The Magnus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, published by the Cape, and the now famous paperback covers for Agatha Christie (1963-1975), all work which was featured in Art Terracina.