About The Artist

As a child I was lucky enough to be inspired by wonderful art in my grandmother’s small London flat. She was a German émigré and her collection included Nolde, Chagall and Franz Marc. I loved art, and used my passion for colour to help forge a very successful career in gardens and gardening. I found the extraordinary colour palette of plants a revelation, a mass planting of purples with dashes of blue and red made me vibrate like it was a Rothko.

It was hardly surprising that, discovering my gift as a painter in my early 30’s, was like discovering freedom. This is what I had always wanted to do and I became utterly obsessed, painting through the night as if it were the only thing that existed. When I went to Central St Martins art college to ask about enrolling, the tutor just looked at my art and said, ‘Why? You don’t need our help, you have no fear, just keep going’.

I tentatively showed a painting to a gardening client who had a collection of art that I admired. She wanted to buy it immediately. I was reluctant to sell, as if I was losing something that would diminish me. Her response was spot on. ‘Then don’t show them to me again!’ I sold it to her.

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Martin Village description of my first solo show in Stoke Newington 1999

Painting through a period of intense feeling and reflection Adam Caplin has produced a body of paintings which deserves serious attention.

The paintings are intensely personal. Sometimes, within an abstract setting, Adam will scratch or otherwise describe a remembered scene from his youth or put together a landscape view. He likes landscapes (he knows more about it than most, he’s a landscape gardener) and applies paint with a vigorous confidence that comes from emotional rather than intellectual centres. Richly coloured pigments are applied with exuberance and an artistic intelligence which is all the more astonishing for the fact that, beyond a lifelong interest in art, he is self-taught.

Although Adam does acknowledge some artistic influences (such as the abstract expressionists Hofmann and Hodgkin) his paintings are not self-conscious in the sense that they intend to emulate the work of other painters or a particular school of painting, Adam’s impulse comes from a much more primal source. One of the paradoxes of the best abstract expressionist paintings is that even though the painter might be wrestling with conflicted, difficult or even depressive feelings, the viewer experiences the resulting paintings as contemplative and elevating, if one dare use the word, to the spirit.

The mystery of art is that it can enrich our mood and touch us with a heightened sense of aesthetic awareness. I think Adam’s painting do just that.