The world has Adam Neate’s cousin to thank for his emergence as one of the UK’s most influential young artists. As a 10-year-old in the 1980s, Adam used to visit his graffiti-obsessed cousin and ended up making his own street art debut in Dedham. He trained as a graphic designer but found working nine-to-five too restricting and began painting for himself when he got home at night. In August, Adam’s solo exhibition, Paintings, Pots and Prints, sold out at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms in London. Angela Meredith talks to him about painting, Banksy, humanity and Merrie Olde England.
Adam Neate cannot remember what his first attempt at street art was.
“Something on a garage door and probably very limited with colours,” he admits.
Now 28, Adam says he always wanted to be a painter, but could not justify the cost of spending three years at art college, so studied graphic art instead.
“Graphic design, for me personally, is kind of an art, but involves positioning stuff and combining colours and composition, which creates a graphic effect. It is like being a plumber in some ways – you learn how to put components together.”
He sees painting as “very separate” from drawing – and paints straight onto the surface he is using.
“If I did preliminary sketches and worked it out, it would never have the same essence – for me, it loses that excitement of painting.”
His knowledge of the human figure comes from what he absorbs rather than studies. He admits that he assimilates images, objects and situations in his environment very quickly.
“Chairs fascinate me in how people sit on them and use them. You can have different states of emotion and mind depending on how you are sat on a chair. Just in the way a human figure relates to an object in that way, I find fascinating.“
He is constantly looking at the shape of objects and making connections.
In two self-portraits, Adam broke the flat surface of the paintings using his traditional stapled collage – but also incorporated some of his favourite objects: his ears are the two halves of his broken skateboard.
He says he wanted to represent different influences in his life – art, skateboarding, music.
“For me the most powerful image is another face. You can paint anxiety, you can paint tension, you can paint fear just in the shape of a face. It doesn’t get any more intense than a face staring right back at you.”
The self-portraits are something of a breakthrough.
“When I got the two big canvases, I thought I could use anything as long as it would stick. It broke it all open again to start experimenting more. I’m into mixing as much media as possible – and any new technology, such as digital prints, mixed with paint.”
Adam uses photographs frequently in his work, as in two paintings depicting a thug and a football supporter.
In Come On, the figure of the thug hangs suspended in his environment and appears to have a halo.
“The light could be a halo, he could have been killed, he could be a floating spirit, he could have been stabbed yesterday.”
Adam admits to being a spiritual person – “not necessarily religious” – but is very aware of his surroundings and paints his social environment.
“I’m a feelings painter – I paint what is around me: East London and a lot of less well off areas. You see characters, you see faces, you see people struggling.”
Adam was brought up in the army town of Colchester. Picking up bullet shells in a wooded training area made him aware as a child of the stark reality of the army and England’s history.
The kneeling football fan in The Queen’s Special is representative of a contemporary version of a modern-day knight, he says. But the figure is drunk and close to being sick, rather than being knighted for noble deeds.
“This prompts the question what makes a ‘special’ Englishman today. Is it drinking twenty pints of beer?”
The colour palette used in his last exhibition – monochrome splashed with red, white and blue – was deliberate. The works also referenced other famous artists: he looks at art books and visits Tate Modern.
But at first he never considered whether his own art – which he gave away for free – would make money and end up in a gallery.
He used cardboard he found on the street because he couldn’t afford canvases – and decided to start giving away his work when he ran out of space in his flat.
He began by putting a few paintings in a bag and leaving them outside charity shops, but discovered one package of his paintings dumped out for the bin men.
“Rejected by the charity shops,” he laughs.
The rejection proved a turning point.
On the way home, he decided to leave the paintings in the streets, hanging them on walls and lampposts as an outdoor gallery.
The decision gave him a positive feeling – “an energy, an expression”.
When he moved to London he found “more streets, more cardboard” and carried on like this for six years, working as a graphic designer during the day.
He estimates he has already left 6,000 paintings for free – and admits to being impressed that Picasso gave away 10,000 paintings. Art lovers can expect to find another 4,000 paintings on the street before he reaches his goal, he says.
“I did it to lose all sense of preciousness, without worrying about what the end result would be – whether people would like it or put it in the bin.”
When he shows his work in galleries, he aims to create the same sense of surprise as finding one of his works on the street.
“Something for everybody,” he says. “A real mixture. Each one is different.”
When his work started to sell, he realised it might be all too easy to paint “a few more blue ones” for commercial reasons.
“With that, you’re losing the point of painting, the essence of what you created – the point of why you create.
“To allow painting to survive, you have to experiment with it and adapt with it, and push it forward alongside the new stuff and combine it with digital technology and photography in order for it to keep reinventing itself.
“The art industry likes to pigeonhole people. You’re not just born to do landscapes or portraits – you are able to do different things if you want to. I could spend a year making landscapes if I wanted to – making depressing landscapes, blue or sad.”
Is he a blue/sad person? No, he says.
“Maybe I have to bottle it all up for the paintings and it comes out,” he adds. “But I’m not going to start randomly crying in pubs to strangers.
“If I’m happy, it will be in the paintings. It’s my relationship with the person who views it in the gallery or in the streets: it’s like a mirror and if they connect with it and understand how I’m feeling or what I’ve done, I like that connecting.
“I’m a humanist. I love Big Brother. There are all aspects of humanity in there – happiness, depression, anxiety – all revealed on TV. You could paint it for years.”
He admits to liking the physicality of painting.
“It’s the rawest thing. I was out in the garden painting yesterday – sun, insects walking around me, wet paint.
“I love that, it’s brass tacks creativity – when the motor neurons in your head connect with your hand and you get an idea to do a circle or a line. I love that spontaneity of creating something. It doesn’t have to be good. You’re just doing it.
“And the more complicated you make it – when you’ve got masses of assistants – the more that essence gets lost along the way.”
He is struck by the fact that Damien Hirst’s one desire is that he wishes he could paint.
He rates Banksy as a thinker and has met the elusive artist – “he was really busy, phone in one hand”, he reveals.
“He’s on a mission to do stuff. I like him because he’s not afraid of the scale of his ideas.”
And what is the most profound thing he has learned about himself from his painting?
“That I’m not a perfectionist, “ he says. “I just try. If you are confident in your own work, I think you have a problem.
“I think I’ve learned not to be afraid of doing new things. If I didn’t enjoy it, I would stop. And if I got into a routine, I would stop.
“But I have no wild ambitions to start doing mad installations. I never make massive plans. I like waking up each morning and thinking I must paint, but not knowing what. The idea of not knowing inspires me to keep painting. I like painting. I’m a painter.”
Adam Neate will be exhibiting in Small, Medium, Large at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms, 5 October – 10 November. Elms Lesters Painting Rooms are at 1-3-5 Flitcroft Street, London WC2H 8DH.
