JJ Adams

JJ Adams is a mixed media artist from South West England and Cape Town, South Africa.

"JJ Adams is the Frank Zappa of the UK Fine Art scene. I no longer walk past a gallery without looking in, he's taken icons and buildings we know so well and added a drop of his own brand of creative LSD".

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.

Outside of his gallery work, JJ has also curated and designed interiors and artworks for three central London restaurants and bars and has also been involved in raising money for numerous UK charities through the sale of his artwork. In 2014 a small 30x30cm painting sold at auction raising over £5000 for the Willow Foundation and in 2016 he raised over £3000 for the British Liver Trust when he released a portrait of David Bowie. He has also auctioned his artwork in 2018 at the ‘Remembering Audrey Hepburn’ event in London with Audrey Hepburn’s son giving a talk about his mothers humanitarian legacy and raising money for Lymphoma Action. During the Coronavirus lockdown in 2020 JJ created a piece of artwork that raised £13,000 for the NHS.

JJ Adams was a finalist for the 2016 Fine Art Trade Guild's "Best Selling Published Artist" Award and shortlisted for "Artist of the Year 2017" and was also a finalist for the 2019 ‘Most popular published artist’ award.

The rebellious 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. He spent much of his youth around the studio of South African contemporary artist Derric van Rensburg, where he discovered his love of bright colour and graphic art. JJ studied graphic design at Cape College while working as a part-time apprentice in `Wildfire Tattoos` a busy tattoo studio in central Cape Town. JJ finally returned to the UK in the mid-nineties with the aim of becoming a tattoo artist.

After a number of years living in London and working in 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 self taught graphic designer in the South West of England and also moved into professional sign making while experimenting with art in his spare time. 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. In early 2011, using his experience he had gained working in the tattoo industry, he produced a series of black and white tattooed celebrity images which set the ball rolling.

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 and street art. He admits being influenced at art college by artists like Norman Rockwell, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Sir Peter Blake and illustration artists like Drew Struzan, John Alvin, Guy Peelleart, Storm Thorgerson and lowbrow artists like Coop and Jim Phillips.

JJ Adams lives in West Sussex and works from his art studio in an old converted Mill in the centre of the town of East Grinstead. He is married with five children aged between 4 and 20 and also has a dog.

When he is not creating artwork, he can be found hanging around in Brighton, attending Comic-Conventions or playing Dungeons & Dragons with his kids, he enjoys traveling and has two 1980’s VW Campervans.