"I'VE always loved drawing, from as young as I can remember," says artist Bill Adams.
"I would be doodling and colouring cartoons, lying on the floor and listening to the radio, The Shadow, Green Lantern, Foster Hewitt calling the hockey games and my favourite, Red Skelton."
Adams takes a small painting from the wall in his North Vancouver home. The landscape in watercolour is by his grandfather, W.H. McMahon. Did Adams inherit his talent from McMahon, an artist and a member of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police?
Impossible to say, but Adams' father, whose name was William Hastings Adams, did trek from Flint, Mich., all the way to northern Alberta where he met and married Jessie, daughter of William Hastings McMahon.
Like his grandfather, Adams, born in Grande Prairie in 1936 and raised in Edmonton, served with the police, in his case, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He was posted to Ottawa where, thanks to a faulty appendix, he met his wife-to-be, nurse Grace Leblanc.
In those days, members of the force were prohibited from marrying until they had served for five years. Adams lived on the post and Leblanc in hospital residence in Ottawa and in Chemainus on Vancouver Island, marking time.
By the fourth year, Adams had realized he was not cut out for police work. He bought his way out of the Mounties and returned home to Edmonton where he and Leblanc married in 1959.
Bill joined Levitt-Safety, an industrial fire protection company, where he remained until he retired in 1993, rising from the order desk through sales to management. In the early years, Bill and Grace were transferred to British Columbia, making their home in North Vancouver.
It was a busy life, with Bill traveling to mines and industrial sites in northern British Columbia and Alberta, while Grace held the fort at home, raising their three daughters and continuing her nursing career. "Grace worked harder than I ever did and still does," says Bill. "Her hard work got us where we are today."
Bill also credits Grace with converting him from amateur to professional artist, but that is ahead of the story. In 1975, Bill's mother, Jessie, encouraged her son to pick up a paintbrush. "She said, 'Just give it a try,' and I did," Bill recalls. "I found a photograph of a beached wreck in the National Geographic and worked on that painting until 2: 30 in the morning. I was hooked. I went out the next day and bought supplies, probably all the wrong things."
Self-taught, with no formal training, Bill's work is distinctive, whether one is looking at a landscape, a floral piece or the presence of wolves in a birch forest.
It wasn't long before Grace was encouraging Bill to sell his work.
"I did have my first commission back in my teens," says Bill. "My brother got me to paint comic book characters in the bedrooms of my nieces and nephews, and I'm sure he paid me something to do it, but it never dawned on me that I could make a living as an artist."
Selling his first painting to
Woodward's department store was the beginning. "I took in the painting, a cabin on a lake, and the man I met with said, 'I like it. What do you want for the painting, not the frame, we have those.' I blurted out an amount, I think it was $100 and that was my first sale."
Bill has exhibited throughout the Lower Mainland at gift shops, hospitals and craft fairs, frequently in tandem with Grace, an accomplished quilter. Private shows where Bill could meet and talk with his patrons were most successful.
"The money is appreciated; it pays for my painting habit. I get most satisfaction from meeting the people who like my work, who are willing to part with their hard-earned dollars to bring my paintings into their homes," says Bill. "We've made many good friends over the years."
Bill's paintings are on exhibition with the porcelain art of Denise Jeffrey at North Vancouver's District Foyer Gallery, 355 West Queens Street, until April 3, 2012. They can also be viewed on his website at www.billadamsart.ca.
Laura Anderson works with and for seniors on the North Shore. Contact her at 778-279-2275 or email her at [email protected].
