The matrix of pleasure: Adam Halls
It started in Japan, the thematic series, most famously enacted in Hokusai’s 100 views of Mount Fuji. Looking at Adam Halls large needle-felt paintings we feel intense joy. Man and nature in genuine harmony - Halls has lived on his family farm all his life and his new work shows a richer language, a deeper spirituality
“Man lives from nature, nature is his body and he must contain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die” Hokusai
Claude Monet probably saw Hokusai’s prints before he painted his series of 15 views of a group of haystacks showing 15 varieties of light in different weathers at different times of day. In Monet’s stacks the colours glow from within the motif - these paintings had an effect on Halls, he recognised the passing of time and seasons, the eternal, the ephemeral. In his latest body of work comprising exuberant oil panels and accomplished multi layered chiffon, wool and silk embroideries, the viewer crouches in the midst of densely packed shrubbery and looks up through the trees with Adam - into the light
