Tom Adams (illustrator)
| Tom Adams | |
|---|---|
| Born |
29 March 1926 Providence, Rhode Island |
| Occupation | Illustrator |
| Spouse(s) | Georgie Adams (m. 1972) |
| Children | 5 |
Tom Adams (born March 29, 1926) is a US-born Anglo-Scots illustrator and painter. Long active in a variety of visual formats, he is known for his work in book cover art, portrait painting, poster, advertising and album art. He is most widely known for his book cover art for the paperback editions of Agatha Christie. Tom Adams has five children (three by his first marriage) and lives with his wife, children’s writer Georgie Adams, in rural North Cornwall.
Tom Adams was born into a family of town and urban planners. His grandfather, Thomas Adams (1871-1940), was an influential urban planner, who served as an advisor to Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt and went on to found the Civic Improvement League in 1915 and the Town Planning Institution of Canada in 1919. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to suggest that Thomas Adams was one of the principal founders of urban planning as a discipline. His two sons went on to make their mark in American and English town and urban planning. The younger son, Frederick Johnstone Adams, was a member of the faculty of MIT from 1932 to 1964, who helped to establish the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, serving as its first Head of Department from 1944-1957. Tom Adams’s father, James W. Renwick Adams OBE (1898 – 1969), worked as a planner for the English county council of Kent. From this background, the strong sense of visual composition in Tom Adam’s work becomes more understandable. Moreover, Adam’s visual work is drawn to the challenge of integrating seemingly disparate elements into an integral whole.
Adams served for two years in the Navy (1944-1946). He then trained at the Chelsea School of Art and Goldsmith's College, where he received a National Diploma of Painting in 1949. Between 1953 and 1960 Adams provided illustrations for the youth-oriented UK publications Eagle, Girl and Swift. In 1958, he founded Adams Design Associates with Anna and Andy Garnett, where he produced large murals in the then-new medium of laminated plastic for various firms such as The Royal Bank of Scotland, Chartered Bank, Aspro Nicholas and Airscrew Jicwood.
In 1965, Adams joined his father, the late James W.R. Adams OBE, eminent town planner and landscape architect, who was planning and design consultant to the Poster Advertising Planning Committee, for whom he helped produce a book: Posters Look to the Future.
In the sixties and seventies he became involved with several distinguished poets including Edward Lucie-Smith, Ted Hughes, C. Day Lewis, Brian Patten, George MacBeth and Adrian Henri as well as artists Sandra Blow, John Piper, Josef Herman, and Mark Boyle and among others, producing poetry prints published by his own gallery, the Fulham Gallery, London. Adams also designed posters for Mark Boyle's light shows (The Sensual Laboratory), the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Soft Machine. His connection with the modern world of rock music continued when he met Lou Reed, an admirer of his Christie and Raymond Chandler covers. Adams designed the cover for his first UK solo album.
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