Norman Adams RA

 This site is to commemorate the life and work of Norman Adams RA. Norman died on March 9th 2005 of Parkinson’s disease.

This site offers:

A brief biography of Norman Adams, click here.

News obout exhibitions and the book on Adams by N Usherwood, click here.

To contact me, Benjamin Adams, or purchase a copy of the book on Norman Adams (£25) e-mail injamben@hotmail.com.

A virtual retrospective of Norman's work click here

Norman Adams was the leading British religious painter of the 20th century. Testament to this are the many of his large commissioned works of religious subjects (click to see pages), most of which are housed in churches. There is a set of paintings based on The Pilgrim’s Progress in St. Anselm’s Church, (See page on this site) Kennington and ‘Stations of the Cross’ at both The Church of Our Lady of Lourdes (click to see church website) in Coffee Hall, Milton Keynes and at St Mary’s (also known as the Hidden Gem) in Mulberry Street, Manchester (Click to see website). These are all well worth a trip round England: The Stations of the Cross in Manchester have been known to reduce grown men to tears.

One must expect somebody who has painted many religious paintings to have been very spiritual, and Norman was. He spent much of his life thinking about religion and spirituality, and was greatly moved by religious texts. He could not understand how any European artist could avoid painting Christian subjects, as so much of the tradition of European art is to do with Christianity.

Although very spiritual, Norman was not by any conventional definition a Christian. He almost never went to church, and if he did it was for inspiration rather than instruction. His belief was along the lines of Blake, who he much admired. He loved religion, and loved the inspirational art associated with it, but he could never bring himself to commit himself to a single religion. I remember he once described himself as a ‘compulsive believer’. If there was a religion that anybody could believe in, he could find it moving and gain inspiration from it.