When I chatted with Adam we were both trying to pin down the year that I first wrote about his work. The consensus was that it was about four years ago. Since then I have written three features, this is the fourth. I actually made a confession to Adam. I had been walking through St. Peter’s Square those four years ago and spotted him and his easel in one of his favourite spots: looking down the length of the Metrolink platform, opposite Café Nero. Always curious – but never wanting to intervene with a plein air painter – I got close enough to surreptitiously look over his shoulder and then spot ‘A. Ralston’ loosely painted onto his easel. I wandered over to Manchester Art Gallery, sat on the steps and Googled him.

 

Subsequently I managed to visit Adam at his Blackpool home and look around the studio in his back garden.

 

Since then I have followed his work closely and admire the freshness of his cityscape painting. “I just start putting brush strokes down and see what emerges. Sometimes a painting takes a couple of hours to start to work. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. Eventually something will emerge, but it’s not about accuracy, it’s about catching the mood, moment and light.”

 

A native of Blackpool, a fan of Manchester painting locations…and a fan of painting Venice. “I was there for a week in October last year. I managed to paint about thirty boards…and lost half a stone walking from one place to the other.” Always seeking the mood, moment and light.

 

Adam’s current exhibition at Contemporary Six on Princess Street, very close to one of his favourite painting locations, has almost forty works, mostly Manchester cityscapes. But the two paintings which immediately caught my eye were from the latest Venice selection. Adam’s work could loosely be described as impressionist; capturing the feel of what he is looking at, not attempting to be tightly controlled and strictly representative. But they are made of a thousand brush strokes, which, in Adam’s words, ‘emerge into a painting.’ Two of the Venice paintings reduce brush strokes to an impressionist minimum. I always look at any painting from two view points – taking in the whole and then peering into the paint from very close to. I make no apology for ‘zooming in’ to one of the Venice paintings which intrigued me. It is from close to that the complete spontaneity of the brush strokes becomes even more apparent. Unhindered, instinctive brush strokes that create…yes, an impression of what Adam is seeing. After all, the birth of Impressionism lies within Claude Monet’s 1872 painting, ‘Impression Sunrise.’ 

 

There are other Venice paintings in the show, alongside pure Mancunian scenes. Maybe it’s the pure glow of pure pigment on ‘Salute Sunset I’ and ‘Salute Sunset II’ that pulled me into their presence. The light in the other Venice paintings, although beautifully executed, have more subdued qualities – but then that is what Adam would have seen. The Sunsets have a complex, quickly applied palette of blues, greens, ochres, with just minimal vibrant and pure yellow strokes that bring the whole to light instantly. I can imagine Adam walking beside the canals of Venice waiting for that moment of light and ‘bursting’ the paint quickly onto the canvas before the moment has gone. I asked him how he managed to capture such fleeting images. “I just start to capture that moment. Of course it goes very quickly, but then it’s captured in my mind too. I can finish what the moment has given to me.”

 

Adam Ralston’s exhibition, ‘Cityscapes and Waterways,’ is at Contemporary Six until April 6th. An unmissable opportunity to look at these paintings from very, very close to.