1

Irvine the logger
1950s
Bald Range near Summerland, BC

Credits:
Courtesy of Beryl Hammerton
Vancouver Sun, 1971

2

Irvine and his "hand fiddle"
1950s
Bald Range near Summerland, BC

Credits:
Courtesy of Beryl Hammerton
Barrie Agur

3

Adams' pastel, "From Peach Orchard Cemetery"
1953
Summerland, British Columbia, Canada

Credits:
Irvine Adams

4

Adams' pastel, "The Dancing Cloud"
1951
Unknown

Credits:
Irvine Adams
Glenn Clark
Penticton Art Gallery

5

Adams' pastel, "Ghosts of the Timberline"
1953
Revelstoke National Park, British Columbia

Credits:
Irvine Adams

6

Acceptance into juried shows is beneficial to an artist's career but waiting for the art buyers to notice your work takes some patience! In June of 1954 Irvine got a job painting the Entomology Lab at the Research Station, not a landscape but the walls and ceilings! In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Irvine applied to the Canada Council requesting a grant to pursue his art without having to worry about his income. He was rejected five times.

7

Adams' pastel, "Along Highway 97"
1960
Summerland

Credits:
Irvine Adams
Shaw Cable, Penticton,1988

8

Reported the Penticton Herald: "There are degrees of realist painting: the realist who does not record a slice of the world, but a visual image collected from his experience, inspiration and memory; whose emphasis is on the senses as seen in some of Andrew Wyeth's works. There are realist paintings that go beyond the imagination into hallucination called surrealism, [as in Dali's works]. There are realists who freeze their work where nothing moves; where objects and places are delineated with a fine, frigid line as Alex Colville does. Then there is Adams' work whose slice of the world is known to all of us. Each piece must be looked at closely in order to appreciate how he has handled the difficult medium of pastels. He is a master craftsman, for he also made his mattes and frames."

9

Adams' pastel, "Black Birches by the Pool"
1958
Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada

Credits:
Irvine Adams
D. Lesmeister, 1975
Penticton Herald

10

The generic definition of pastel is a stick of ground pigment mixed with just enough binder to keep its shape. In chalk pastels the binder is gum tragacanth. Tragacanth is a natural gum obtained from the dried sap of several species of Middle Eastern legumes, some known collectively under the common names "goat's thorn" and "locoweed." Pastels offer numerous means of expression by applying colours directly or mixing colours by blending with a rag or fingers.

11

Adams' pastel, "Noon Day Glow"
1958
Summerland

Credits:
Irvine Adams

12

Adams' pastel, "First Snow"
1961
Summerland

Credits:
Irvine Adams
Bruce Crawford, artist

13

Newspaper article about Irvine
1958
Summerland

Credits:
Courtesy of Don Adams
Penticton Herald, 1958

14

Doreen Adams
1956
West Summerland

Credits:
Courtesy of Beryl Hammerton