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JJ Adams is a traditional and digital artist from South West England.

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 a part-time 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 the mid-nineties with the aim of becoming a tattoo artist.

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​After a number of frustrated years living in London and working in places like Camden Market and 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.

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Adams uses a range of mixed media in his work from spray paint to hand painting acrylics, screen printing, collage and digital matte painting as well as photography. He admits being influenced at art school by artists like Norman Rockwell, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Sir Peter Blake and more obscure artists such as Guy Peelleart, Hipgnosis and Storm Thorgerson and lowbrow artists like Coop, Jim Phillips and Graham Coton who was a World War II comic book artist.

JJ Adams works from his studio overlooking the Thames Barrier in South East London.





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A video interview with JJ Adams by Michele Young at the Great British Tattoo Show :

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Excerpt taken from an interview with JJ discussing his creative process, growing up in South Africa and his family history.

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PL - JJ what do you call your style of art and is the process very involved?

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JJ - I don't know really, that's difficult, is it really art? it's a hybrid of a few things I suppose. Let's just call it a form of  illustration for the moment. I love drawing and painting on canvas but I also love working digitally, the difference between traditional and digital art is that you don't have to wait for pixels to dry and layers can be independently adjusted, I try and fuse different mediums where I can, I mix my own colour palette and take samples for my digital work or photograph my own textures and items to use in them, the more I can use that is real the more I feel that the piece starts to come alive, I create what I would like to see on my own wall at home and what is inside my head and what I need to get out to create space for more, depending on the medium sometimes an image can take me weeks to complete and if it's digital it can be made up of two to three hundred individual layers, other times the initial photograph works and I only need to paint in maybe 30 layers or if I am painting onto canvas just a few days, it depends on the models or the subject matter or the medium. On my matte `Westminster` piece, the initial photograph of the lengthy building took me longer to get right than the studio time. I don't use a high performance Mac either, my computer is about a hundred years old and I practically have to kickstart it, but I like it that way.

 

PL - What type of camera do you use for your photography?

 

JJ - I use a Canon Eos Digital SLR with different lense kits depending on the shots needed, I usually photograph indoors and outdoors in order to create one piece. I'll set up the initial building shot outdoors and also take shots nearby of textures and surfaces that are relevant but a lot of the rest of the photography may be taken indoors after I have set up the props needed or if I am using models and so on. For example, a lot of the graffiti I use in some of my `Rule Brittania` series, I'll spray in the studio and then photograph before I start to collage and paint them into the layered image and sometimes I'll go out and photograph elements and textures on other buildings nearby that I need. Sometimes If I can't get the building shot I want, I'll take many different photographs of the building and composite them together to get the shot I was originally looking for. I also use a wacom drawing tablet.

 

PL - In your London and building scenes you have graffiti on the buildings, do you do graffiti yourself and what made you think of creating images like that. 

 

JJ - I have done graffiti in the past but it was never something I did seriously, it's an adrenaline rush but I think a lot has changed over the last decade and a lot of street art these days is done with permission which is irrelevent if it's about the art itself as you are using the street as a canvas and sometimes you don't want to rush something while always looking over your shoulder but if it's about a tag or reputation then it isn't necessarily about art at all unless you are someone like Shepard Fairey and you do have a message, but it's a great means of expression regardless of whether it's legal or not or how it is done.

The person that inspired my graffiti building scenes was an artist called Mel Brigg who lived on a farm in South Africa who in the eighties when I was about 10 years old we visited and he had painted in acrylic on canvas a very realistic piece of the Berlin Wall complete with graffiti and added real barbed wire across the frame beneath the glass. That piece had a huge impact on me and it's been in my mind ever since and I think that this is where this idea initially evolved from.

 

I used to work a nightshift job for Natwest bank in the east-end of London in 1998 and for about a year I would get the first train home from Liverpool street to Walthamstow in the early morning 5 days a week, but as I would sometimes finish early at 4 or 5am on say a sunday morning I would have to walk from either Aldgate-East or the Old Street offices through the dead-silence with an hour or two to spare. It was dark and eerie but also a great time to take in the city as it's rarely seen with absolutely no-one around, like an apocolypse had happened, I 'd imagine Jack the Ripper was following me, haha. I remember walking through an alley in Whitechapel that had building work being done to it, and discovered Graffiti from the punk and skinhead era scrawled all over the wall that had been uncovered by the building work. Thinking back now, I wish I'd had my camera with me, sadly no camera phones in those days.

 

​PL - Is there anything in particular that inspires you while you are working?

 

JJ - Yea, I listen to a lot of music while working, I have an old record player in the studio and listen to a lot of vinyl, a lot of British bands like Pink Floyd and bands like the Sex Pistols or the Clash, it depends on what I am working on, sometimes Led Zeppelin or the Who or Lou Reed, I listened to a lot of Pink Floyd while working on my Rule Brittania series, it depends on my mood. I collect a lot of the early 90's grunge bands and a lot of punk stuff. There is a great record store in South London that I get a lot of my vinyl from in the bargain section, I'm a collector but I'm not a vinyl purist, I buy it if it isn't too scratched and it's cheap, I buy it for the the music not the collectability, nothing beats listening to orignal vinyl while working.

 

PL - What's the relevance of the Diamond symbol in your work? I'm seeing diamonds everywhere at the moment, is it your trademark logo so to speak? Also I always see you wearing a hat is that a bit of a trademark for you as well?

 

JJ - No, haha the hat isn't really intentional, I wear the hat simply because sometimes I can't be bothered to style my hair in the morning, I don't wear it all the time, as for the diamond It's a symbol I use in my work that's relevant to growing up in South Africa and the diamond mining that went on by Barney Barnato in the 1870's, I was fascinated by him growing up and what he achieved, it also symbolises honesty and integrity in the tattoo world so I use it on all my work as a symbol that the work is my own. It's got absolutely nothing to do with the current fashion trend which will soon pass.

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PL - What can you tell me about growing up in South Africa during Apartheid, did you see any of the violence and has it influenced you?



JJ - Growing up in South Africa was very eventful, I don't normally get to talk about it. I was kicked out of a couple schools for being too much trouble and was kept back two years, I was sent to a boarding school and kicked out of that and at age 16 my parents had me referred to a psychologist to try and find out why I was so much trouble and what was wrong with me. I was even thrown out of my art college for "damaging other students work and breaking a window deliberately with an electric guitar"?  I don't know what I was doing, but I do remember being very bored a lot of the time, I spent a lot of my time at art college, hanging out in the local tattoo studio and drawing tattoo designs instead of being in class. I did ace "computer design" in college however. I was also an avid skateboarder and spent a lot of time doing that instead of being in class. My main artistic influence growing up was Derric van Rensburg and still is today and it was Derric that helped me channnel my creativity. He sat me down one day in front of blank canvas and helped me to recreate a vintage jimi hendrix poster from a small magazine clipping and that's when I think things changed.

 

I also had some crazy experiences in South Africa, like being kidnapped with my best friend Ryan (Derric's son) while hitch-hiking or getting chased by the police for dodging my train fare to school, I got mugged at knife point for my shoes once and then thrown from the moving train, I have quite a few stories like that. Sadly I lost some friends to the violence. I got my first tattoo on my forearm which in those days was a very bold statement but it bought me some security and stopped a lot of confrontation in the street as there was a lot of gang-related stigma attached to tattoos in the early nineties in South Africa, I never really got involved in the Graffiti scene, I did the odd bit here and there, the punishment didn't fit the crime in those days, I was more into tattoo art, there was too much going on at the tattoo studio and I was working part-time as backstage crew for concerts and events so I was very busy. I had some good times as well and got to meet a lot of interesting celebrities and different bands, Cape Town is a beautiful place and I do miss it sometimes. I remember first getting back to the UK in the late 90's and I headed straight for New Wave Tattoo in London to see Lal Hardy to find out about getting an apprenticeship, I walked in, had a look at some tattoo flash, saw Lal Hardy behind the counter, lost my nerve and left thinking maybe I'm not cut out to be a tattoo artist. I liked the idea of being one and had spent a lot of time working in a studio drawing flash and being the general dog's body, but I always doubted my ability and never thought my drawing or my work was nearly good enough. Although Wildfire Tattoos in Cape Town still has a sheet of my designs  up that are still popular to this day.

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PL - You've had some interesting experiences. Were you born in South africa and what's the reason for the british theme in a lot of of your work?



JJ - No, I was born in Plymouth in the UK, then moved to Manchester and then left when I was six, my grandmother was actually born in a small flat above Neal Street in Covent Garden and her parents were all stage hands in theatre production in the West end and the rest of my family go back many generations all working in London and the industrial textile factories in Bradford. The only reason that South Africa came about is that my grandfather who was a butcher in Yorkshire in the 1960's one day decided to drive the family in his land rover and caravan from Bradford to Cape Town for fun after reading a book about that type of thing and didn't come back to the UK, it took him like six months or something because I think he took a wrong turn somewhere. I still don't know what he was thinking. There'a spirit of adventure in my family for sure. So a lot of my work is influenced by experiences from my life so far but my family history plays a big part too and I'm a bit of a royalist, I always wanted to move back to the UK after we had moved to South Africa. I learnt the languages at school like `Afrikaans` and `Xhosa` and was told I wouldn't get a job without them, but I don't know if that was quite true. Don't get me wrong, if it looks like I am poking fun by creating an image of the Queen with tattoos or the likes of Winston Churchill, I have the utmost respect for them and what they have achieved and stand for. I am also very proud of my family's service during the second world war and that has a massive influence on my work too. 

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Two members of my family both aged 21 died in Lancaster Bombers in 1942 serving in Bomber Command, one of them Sgt. JJ Cooper served in Squadron 106 of which key members later formed the Dambuster Squadron and he flew alongside Wing Commander Guy Gibson, Gibson mentions the bomber failing to return from a bombing raid in his book "Enemy Coast Ahead" JJ was the flight engineer and sat next to Squadron Leader FH Robertson who Gibson refers to as his close friend "Robbo" in his book. They were shot down by a german nightfighter over holland on a return bombing raid on Hamburg, apparently the bomb bay door hydraulics malfunctioned and they were shot down fully laden with the 4,000lb "Cookie" and their full bomb payload on board. You can look at that in two ways I suppose. Have I lost you yet?



PL - No, that's quite a story, I watched a documentary on Guy Gibson and the Dambusters recently and I find it very interesting as do a lot of people, have you any plans to do something Dambuster related in your art?

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JJ - Yeah certainly, my grandfather's brother knew Guy Gibson, so it is a very personal story to me and I used to love the film as a kid, I have his RAF flag and medals framed at home and I think about it daily, the excavated parts of his bomber are on display at Metheringham visitor's centre in Lincolnshire, recently I saw the recovered parts from the crash site and it really moved me and I do want to create something in memory of this, this is part of the reason for the second world war and RAF theme in some of my work, when it comes to war stories I have a few, unlike his brother who was killed in action, my Grandfather was sunk two months prior by the Japanese on the HMS Cornwall in April 1942 and survived after spending two days floating in the shark infested waters of the Indian ocean but that's another story altogether and will no doubt be the subject for an interesting piece of work at some point. I'll stop now, I could talk about war stories all day long and I'm getting completely sidetracked.

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PL - I get the impression you'll be doing more WW2 related pieces. You seem to have quite a range of subject matter, Tattoos, Buildings, Comic Art, People?



JJ - I definitely will be, I blend all the family history and stories I heard as a child with my experience working in a tattoo studio in South Africa and also working in London, mixed in with my love of comic books, science fiction, rock n' roll, lowbrow art, tattoo artwork and pop culture and what comes out is a bizarre cocktail, take it or leave it, you don't have to like it if you don't want to.

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What I see and experience goes in and gets filed away and at some point is triggered and mixes in with my imagination, although everytime I create something new I always feel it could be better or that it doesn't even come close to what I was really thinking, I don't really consider myself an artist, I am not always trying to make a statement with my work but to just get out what I have going around in my head, mainly for my own amusement.



PL - I read recently that you did a painting that's going to be featured in a book about the complete history of the film `Pulp Fiction` by Quentin Tarantino?

 

JJ - Yea, it's due out in September or October in the states, should be quite informative, I'll probably have to buy myself a copy.

 

PL - And finally, what you are currently working on or is it a closely guarded secret?

 

JJ - Ha-Ha, umm no. I'm working on a couple of commissions at the moment and then it's back to something I've been working on for a while, that's all I can say.

 

PL - Thank you for the interview JJ, it was great to talk to you and get a little insight into your creative thinking and experiences.



JJ - No Problem at all, thank you.