- Venue
- Elsie's Place, Leigh Community Centre
- Location
- East England
Based in Leigh On Sea, Adrian is a painter of abstraction and landscape, and musician, producing ambient albums, and the relationship of sound and vision in this body of work comes together. Elsie’s Place is sympathetic to the arts, run by Jo Overfield of www.sundownarts.org.
Adrian creates desirable, seductive works of art: luxurious, tactile surfaces,
structured geometric orderliness, but the quality of colour and surface within the canvasses forever change depending on the quality of light and time of
day. There is a subtle balance between the lustrous sheen and grittiness, the
geometry and the spontaneity of marks and brush strokes. Images of landscapes drift along the horizontal axis, giving a romantic depth to the series of canvases. The horizon line in each work of art -painting and collage, a strong contrast of landscape within the repetition of small rectangular elements juxtapose the body of work and music to create a cohesive visual rhythm.
Adrian produces neo-classical ambient instrumental music, in which narratives unfold, evocative of the simplicity, but sophistication of bleak, open landscapes. These are soundtracks to romance, melancholia, a renewed sense of time, space, place and oneself. Adrian releases music for the specialist ambient label www.preservedsound.com.
Unusually, Adrian’s processes of working are symbiotic. “The way I work is quite similar in music and painting. I build up in layers, like starting a painting and reactions to layers develop in response to each other. In creating my music, I start with a phrase on one instrument, which I build up with another phrase on another instrument.” Within his range of acoustic instruments, such as the bowed psaltery, a folk instrument with medieval roots, or with zither, percussion and laptop, Adrian produces a very distinctive and captivating sound.
The processes of producing music are found in the visual analogy to Adrian’s creativity. He says that “The layers of these compositions hide as much as they reveal:unfolding the miscellaneous elements incorporated into the canvas, the images impressed on the canvas then covered with paint or other images – these are events in a history that is only partly visible. There is a sense for me that the search is as important as the discovery; the pieces reward the closer inspection and repeated viewing. Signs, symbols and shapes that appear enigmatic are often revealed to be detritus of everyday life.”
Great show.
www.artbreak.com/calicoade
www.preservedsound.com/adrian-lane
