Sarah Adams exhibition

If you’re a climber and you like art, you should check out the work of Sarah Adams.

Sarah Adams is one of only a handful of contemporary artists shown by Rupert Maas (Painting expert on BBC Antiques Roadshow) at his Mayfair gallery. The exhibition is of paintings of the cliffs and shoreline of the North Cornwall coast, near Padstow. Her paintings reveal her interest in the sumptuous colours and complex architecture of the rocks, varnished by the sea and unveiled by the tide.

Although she is not a rock climber herself, her interest in rocks is probably as intense as your readers’. To make the initial sketches for her paintings, she either tracks the tide changes and grabs the few hours at low tide to work from the dunes or, during especially low tides she goes out in her kayak (with her dog, Fluke, also in a life jacket) to get a view of the newly revealed cliffs from the sea. She never uses photography, preferring direct observation.

Back in her studio she works on canvases up to seven feet wide. It is a long and arduous process, with revisions and re-workings taking several months until the pictures are finished and can be shown. The effect on people who have never seen them before is quietly powerful: standing, letting the pictures wash over and around them, some actually have their breath taken away by the drama of the cliffs rising, richly caparisoned in minerals, lichen, weed and barnacles, cathedral-like, from pools amongst the rocks and the yellow sands.

Sarah’s exhibition ‘Atlantis’ is at The Maas Gallery, Mayfair, London from 23 March – 2nd April 2011.