Artist Detail

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Greg Adamson

Visual Artist

About the artist: Greg Adamson rekindled his passion for art in 2001 after a twenty year hiatus. A bank executive by profession, Mr. Adamson holds a lifelong passion for the visual arts. He discovered his talent for drawing at a young age. He enrolled in a few art classes in school, but focused on a more traditional education, majoring in finance and accounting. His banking career began in 1977 and early on he was able to periodically combine his career and his interest in art by creating advertising graphics for his employer. He also painted holiday window scenes for some of that bank’s branches. In 1980 he was married and soon after started a family. The responsibilities of family and rapid career advancements soon allowed no time for making art. Fast forward twenty years, the children were grown, he was single again and now able to return to making art. Mr. Adamson began utilizing his vacation time in order to enroll in workshops with nationally and internationally renowned artists. Among the artists with whom he has studied are legendary watercolorists, Milford Zornes and Henry Fukuhara, as well as Skip Lawrence, Christopher Schink, Bob Burridge, Charles Reid, Frank Webb, Tom Lynch, and Ted Nuttal.

About the same time that Mr. Adamson returned to making art, he also began to explore an interest in Italian Street Painting (Madonnari). He has since participated in many street painting festivals throughout Southern California and has been invited to events as distant as Montreal. He has been the featured artist in a number of these festivals where he often recreates in chalk the original works of such masters as Michelangelo and Raphael. He particularly enjoys recreating Michelangelo’s frescoes from the Sistine Chapel. He enjoys working in the large scale (up to 120 sq. ft.) that is afforded by participating in street painting festivals, plus the fleeting nature of these works (normally only two days, then washed away) . He likes to meet and converse with the passersby and never tires of their compliments.

Mr. Adamson maintains a studio and small gallery in Riverside, CA where he works mostly in watercolor, acrylic and mixed media. Recently he has been exploring a progressing interest in creating larger, more abstracted works. “ I’m attracted to the ambiguous nature of abstract painting. I think that the information left out of a painting not only makes the work more interesting, but allows the viewer to create their own story. In this way, the viewing experience becomes more interactive. My goal is to create a painting that evokes an emotional response from the viewer, even if it is not always a positive reaction. After all, when you choose to become an artist, criticism simply goes with the territory.” That said, Mr. Adamson has received various awards and is in constant demand for his creative abilities. He recently participated in the Giant Orange Artventure in Riverside where he was commissioned by the Riverside Art Museum to decorate one of the 4 ½ ft. fiberglass oranges that became a public art display this past summer on the downtown streets of Riverside. He currently has 5 paintings in the Artscape Exhibition at the County of Riverside Administrative Center.