Adam Neate

I was going to write about this guy as his work is amazing, he seems really nice and there's a great story of his eventual success as a painter. I first heard about Adam Neate on Current TV (Sky, channel 183) about a year ago. You can watch a short documentary about him on Current called 'The Art of Neate'. His main influences are Picasso and American graff artist, Daze.

Initially he started painting for his friends and family, giving his paintings away for free, just for the enjoyment of it but he soon accumulated a massive amount of work (1000 paintings a year approx) in his friends garage where he was living at the time in central London. Not having much luck in finding an outlet to sell his stuff he gave a bunch of his paintings to a charity shop in the hope that at least someone might like his work and buy one for the good cause. However, He passed by the same charity shop a few days later only to find that all his work had been put out with the rubbish for collection.

Obviously he was fairly disappointed and came to the conclusion that it would be better to leave them on the streets than have them thrown away. He spent the next five years leaving thousands of his paintings on the streets of London. After a while there was a good buzz about his work and interested people would search the streets and lanes trying to find one of these rare gems. He was subsequently interviewed by a well known London based journalist and this caught the attention of Elms Lester Painting Rooms who still represent his work today. In 2008 one of his paintings 'Suicide bomber' sold for over £78,000. And his exhibitions always sell out within the hour. He has been dubbed the English Picasso and the artist of his generation. His paintings also look like there is a hint of Francis Bacon in them.

Keeping close to his roots, in the same year he held an event called 'The London Show' which seen him leave a million pounds worth of his paintings back on the streets, resting in doorways where they started. He also collaborated with Pop Artist Supremo, Ron English. 2008 was a busy year!

I bought one of his prints off eBay a few weeks after seeing the documentary on him. The credit card was burning a whole in my pocket. EBay drives down the price of all this type of artwork which is both good and bad. The giclee print I bought is called '2am Blog'. There is better one's but I had not seen any of his stuff on eBay before and went jumping in! His street cardboard drop offs are also a regular occurrence on eBay although there is no way of guaranteeing they are genuine and at times there is word on fakes kicking about. He has stopped painting so much these days and trying his hand at sculpture and other mediums. Well enjoy.