Description

Transporters – Road To Nowhere by JJ Adams

Featured in Vogue & GQ and having worked alongside clients like Rolls Royce and Bang & Olufsen, JJ Adams is rapidly becoming one of the UK’s most talked about and collectible artists. He is bold and confident in style often completely transforming celebrity images or iconic landmarks with his own inimitable edge and blurring the lines between new media, pop, fine art, digital art and photography.

The son of a baptist preacher, JJ emigrated as a child from Plymouth in the UK to Cape Town in South Africa in the early eighties. Adams spent much of his youth around the studio of South African contemporary landscape artist Derric van Rensburg, where he discovered his love of bright colour and `graphic`art. JJ studied graphic design at Cape College whilst working as an apprentice in `Wildfire Tattoos` a busy tattoo studio in central Cape Town while also working part-time as backstage crew for international bands visiting South Africa after the end of the Apartheid era. JJ finally returned to the UK in 1998 with the aim of becoming a tattoo artist.

After a number of frustrated years living in London and working in Camden Market struggling to make ends meet, JJ moved back to Plymouth to further study commercial printing at the Plymouth College of Art and Design. Over the next several years he worked as a graphic designer in the South West of England and then moved into sign making and advertising. In 2009 after selling a few of his acrylic paintings through a local gallery he decided it was time to move back to London and finally pursue his art career.

Adams uses a range of new and mixed media in his work from spray painting to hand painting acrylics, stenciling, screen printing, collage and digital composite and matte painting as well as photography.

“The key is not to take yourself or your work too seriously,  just to have fun creating and experiment and ignore criticism and keep your feet on the ground, otherwise it gets too complicated and it ruins your creativity, I create artwork for other people to enjoy and I don’t attempt to save the world with a message that I don’t truly believe. I donate to charities instead through the sale of my artwork who really do know how to make a difference”