Appreciation: Kevin Adams painted Rappahannock, a space he loved

‘With his art, he shared a window into his soul’ 

Kevin Adams painted the real. He found it beautiful. 

Born on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, he traveled and looked, searching out the visual secrets of his subjects. Outside, at the easel, he would draw the contours, define the forms and establish the color relationships, focusing on whatever had captured his attention, before finishing the process in the studio. In 2017, when he was an Artist in Residence in the Shenandoah National Park,  Adams said that “each painting is like a short story, and I need to confirm that the plot is solid and that I can get to this particular story’s ending on that canvas.” 

Kevin’s own story found its ending on Oct. 17, four months after a diagnosis of advanced and irreversible brain cancer. He died at his Washington, Va., home with his family at his side.

When an artist dies

When an artist dies, a lively stream of images and compositions comes to a halt. The distinct way that painter selected subjects, noticed shadows, or mixed colors goes missing. The only consolation is that appreciators can return to the canvases themselves, to stand where the painter once stood and imagine his or her silent choices of what to paint and how to paint it.

On Oct. 21, the scheduled Gay Street Gallery show of Adams’ paintings, along with works of several guest artists, opened with an outpouring of Adams’ friends and collectors. Two days after his spouse’s death, attorney Jay Ward Brown was at the gallery to receive the works of the guest artists and arrange the show — frankly unsure he could manage the occasion without being overcome by the grief of the moment. “Kevin wouldn’t want it canceled,” Brown said, while admitting to a worry that people would find the occasion too painful to show up. As it turned out, collectors, neighbors and friends turned out, expressing fresh appreciation for Adams and his paintings, many buying one more landscape.

“Kevin was an empath,” said Patrick O’Connell, chef proprietor of The Inn at Little Washington. “He could find a way to connect with anyone. He was a great listener and fully present in every conversation. Just being in his presence was therapeutic. He radiated a peaceful energy and wisdom beyond his years. With his art, he shared a window into his soul.” 

There was little the 64-year-old artist couldn’t turn into a painting: hills rolling up against mountains, mountains massing against skies, barns enclosing inky interiors, boats with their curves and colors, piers resting in late afternoon water. Travel-based canvases might feature the geometries of New York City apartment blocks or a lone windmill in Holland. From 1980 till 1985, as a U.S. Marine Corps combat artist, Adams painted fighter planes and tanks. His solo exhibitions over the past 35 years span 11 states. In 1989, the Soviet Union invited him to a three-city tour, his paintings exhibited in Novosibirsk, Tomsk and Moscow.  

Beloved landscapes

 In recent years, Adams focused on two beloved settings — Rappahannock County and Cape Cod, Mass., with regular shows at the Gay Street Gallery he and Brown owned and managed together,  and at a gallery in Provincetown. Painting in two radically distinct settings — rolling Blue Ridge farmlands and fog-layered Cape Cod edges — gave Adams the opportunity to put his versatility on full display, toggling back and forth between two geographies he understood deeply. “Kevin really wanted to know a place he painted,” Brown said. “He wanted to paint places he loved.” 

Paula Amt, Adams’ framer and close friend, remembered showing him images of farmland and barns in rural Pennsylvania. Adams agreed the scenes were pleasing, but said, “That’s not my land, not my space.” He never went there to paint. 

Walking or driving around Rappahannock County, Kevin Adams knew when he was looking at a future Kevin Adams’ painting. And before setting up a fresh canvas, he had to care about the scene. So the formula — if there were one — was love it, then paint it. And apart from Adams’ technical mastery, the love was the secret sauce that made many of his paintings irresistible to the collectors who bought them.

 In “Fourth of July Sky,” owned—and treasured—   by Joanie and Robert Ballard, Adams competently paints two buildings, a gently rolling field and a fence, beneath a clear blue sky. It seems a deceptively simple picture. But the alchemy of the painting runs deeper: the blue sky is obviously made up of summer morning air; the yellowy green in the grass says it’s getting warm, but not yet oppressively hot; two unthreatening clouds suggest untroubled picnics, and a modest American flag on one of the houses signals a good mood, without any aggressive patriotic strutting. In the end, “Fourth of July Sky” is a moment of hopefulness as much as it is a Virginia landscape.

Beauty’s enigma

 Adams’ landscapes carry no secrets, arguments or hidden meanings. They show the real world telling its own story, and the artist’s gesture seldom draws attention away from his subject. But standing in a room of paintings by Kevin Adams, it’s not difficult to discern the artist’s presence at the easel — calm, precise and appreciative of what he is painting. And when the walls are filled with images of the Blue Ridge and Cape Cod, it’s impossible not to realize how hard the man worked. He rose early and got to the studio without dawdling. He enjoyed breaks to the Eastern Shore or New York, but he tended to miss his studio and returned to it soon after unpacking his suitcase.

He wanted to do more than what he could already do well. “I just want to get better at this,” Joanie Ballard recalls him saying. 

Adams was in some ways an outlier in a world where many contemporary works present conceptual puzzles, experimental materials and methods or raw protests. Adams admired the energies and edginess of today’s art, but he was set on finding and representing beauty. “Kevin generally painted things that brought him pleasure to see,” Brown said, “not always sunny and pretty, but in some way beautiful. He wanted people to experience joy and pleasure.”

Countering the growing perception that beauty was little more than visual pleasantry, Elaine Scarry, professor of aesthetics at Harvard University, makes a case for taking beauty seriously in her extended essay, “On Beauty and Being Fair.” She points out that Matisse “repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them, all problems would subside.” Matisse chose to remain in France during World War II and was well aware of the suffering unfolding around him, but the paintings from this time are now cherished for their recumbent forms, serene lines and jubilant colors. 

Scarry also insists that “beauty brings copies of itself into being.” Adams’ work would support that premise: Finding a landscape he found beautiful, he was led to reproduce that particular form of beauty, not simply depict the ridges and rocks that were in front of him. 

Legacy of national parks

Prominent in Adams’ legacy are his paintings from the national parks, particularly the nearby Shenandoah National Park, where he regularly hiked and sketched, painting there in 2017 as part of the park’s Artist in Residence program.

“There is a very long history of a strong connection between the visual arts and the national park movement, dating back to Thomas Moran’s famous paintings of Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite and the Grand Teton,” said Jim Northrup, a National Park Service veteran, who served as superintendent of Shenandoah National Park and Cedar Creek and Belle Grove National Historical Park. “Kevin continued that tradition as one of the early Artists in Residence at Shenandoah. He loves the park, and that shows through his beautiful paintings. Kevin just exuded joy in being in the park, painting and sharing his vision with others.”

The Shenandoah experience yielded more than 40 finished paintings, plus notebooks and sketches. The paintings range from sweeping vistas to close-up compositions of rocks, flora and roots. Adams took his easel to other American parks as well. When the Grand Canyon National Park observed its 75th anniversary, Adams created a series of paintings of the inner gorge. In the same spirit, when Glacier National Park logged its 85th anniversary, he created a group of paintings of back-country landscapes there. The works were exhibited at the parks but also in Washington, D.C., at the U. S. Department of Interior Museum.

During the months of Adams’ illness, the front window of the Gay Street Gallery displayed a giclee print of a painting, “Morning Filtered Light.” The picture is filled with a skeletal barn, aged timbers splayed against a classic Rappahannock sky. The image and its title reveal one of Adams’ few secrets: the dying barn fills the space, but the true subject of the painting is the light that pours through it.