Adrian Paschal Smith
Local Artist with a fascinating backstory.
While out walking with our dogs the other day I met Adrian walking towards me with his dog, Nicky. Although I recognised him, we had never formally met. While our dogs got to know each other we exchanged greetings and shared some local and personal information in much the same way as many other fellow dog walkers do every day.
From this first meeting I gleaned that Adrian was / is an artist. He kindly offered to drop off some literature at our house, which he duly did. It made fascinating reading.
Adrian’s full name is Adrian Paschal Smith. He is pleased to use his middle name as from time to time, particularly at Airports, he’s been confused with the other Adrian Smith who played guitar with the band, Iron Maiden.
I later interviewed Adrian at his home and discovered that he had been inspired to be an artist by his father who was an art teacher, and, says Adrian….
“….a very very good one, who was a good artist in his own right. He was inspirational. He also had a passion for amateur dramatics and designed and made all the scenery for his school’s productions. ……basically, he taught me to paint”.
Adrian trained as an artist at Hornsey College of Art in London. In the late 1960s he trained in the skills of theatre design at the Central School of Art and Design in London with the renowned theatre designer and sculptor, Ralph Koltai who, by coincidence, lived close to here, in La Celle-Geunand, in his latter years.
Towards the end of his course at the Central School, Adrian became involved with a puppet maker called, Brian Moore, who was, in Adrian’s words, “an absolute genius”. He was based at the Beckenham Arts Lab which was, at the time, run by David Bowie and his friend Mary Finnegan.
From these early encounters, Adrian describes learning two very important lessons. First, the artist has to adapt and change the creative focus for every new production, and secondly, at the same time, it’s necessary for the artist to develop and hone their own skills in order to communicate their ideas to an appropriate audience.
25 x 25 Mixed Media on paper.
“One of a series of Abstract paintings incorporating sacred geometry, the intriguing ambiguity of mathematical certainty, and visual/chemical chance.”
20 x 20 Acrylic on canvas
“A friend had a wonderful cottage on the banks of the River Greta, Northumberland (UK). This was the very deep and mysterious pool that we all went swimming in.”
Adrian experienced and learned about large-scale landscapes by painting theatre backcloths in places like the Royal Opera House and the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden, guided by artist, John Campbell. He used traditional pigments which had to be boiled up everyday and, because of their unusual natural ingredients, they were very pungent. These backcloths were painted on the floor of a suitably large building, using long handled brushes, long before they were hung in the theatre. This is an old technique which, in modern times, has been replaced by digital back projections.
Adrian’s later work was with the B.B.C. (British Broadcasting Corporation) as an art director and later as a freelance designer working on T.V. Productions and films. He initially took the job as a holiday relief contract as his son was about to be born and a steady income seemed important.
“It completely changed my life. In those days the money was good and you got a complete training environment thrown in. At the end of the initial training I was given a choice - Director, Producer or Designer? I started working with a lot of really interesting artists, some, as an example, had worked of camouflage techniques during the war. It was a totally different ethos - one of education and learning.”
On leaving the BBC, Adrian freelanced for a while with various TV companies including Anglia and Yorkshire Television. After this he decided to take a year out with his partner, who became his first wife, and they travelled through South America and ended up in Los Angeles. Adrian’s partner worked in the first health food restaurant in Santa Monica. Adrian became involved once a need for Carrot Cake had been established (ask Adrian for the details). He made Carrot Cake for months supplying his partner’s restaurant and other businesses around.
One restaurant visitor was Brian Eatwell who was a film production designer. To cut a long story short, Brian sub-contracted the making of TV commercials to Adrian. The most successful commercial was the “Fast Tire” commercial where they had to recreate the Chicago World Trade Fair from 1901. A real designer’s challenge.
In this artistic world, Adrian was able to travel extensively from such diverse places from Finland to New Zealand and Los Angeles to Morocco. He kept pictorial diaries of these visits. I was pleased to see his pictures of Machu Picchu and Aguas Calientes which I easily recognised from our visit there in 2004.
20 x 31 Watercolour on paper.
“I painted this on a rare day off on a film for TV, Mars 2, that I co-designed. This work is in the style of Arthur Melville, a watercolour hero of mine, who had spent a lot of time painting in Morocco in the late 1980s”
26 x 34 Giclée print, limited edition of 250
“The Causeway and track between the Northumberland Coast and Holy Island (Lindisfarne) appears and disappears twice a day. It is a totally magical place. The light is something very special. This is a print from a series of watercolours that I painted there.”
Adrian visited Le Grand Pressigny on a few occasions with friends who owned a small property here. On one visit the neighbouring property was brought to his attention as it was for sale. He bought the house and over the next few years he renovated it. That renovation is now complete and Adrian lives here in Le Grand Pressigny.
Adrian did not know that his old teacher from years before, Ralph Koltai, also lived locally and once that information had been received, Adrian found himself to be somewhat “shy” about making the first contact. He had nothing to fear. When they eventually met he received a warm welcome from Ralph and his wife, Jane.
Shortly after our first meeting, Adrian held an exhibition in La Cabane, a local Bistro hosted by Loïc and Juliette. It was interesting to see how the pictures on display at the exhibition were, by comparison to Adrian’s earlier work, miniatures.
“Originally a design brief for a futuristic, abstract game: a city that is completely unrecognisable to our visual conscience……..The ideas posed in this work have fascinated me ever since.”
In June this year (2025), Adrian displayed his work in a Retrospective presentation at the gallery “Yzeures Creative”.
I look forward to seeing more of Adrian’s work around the village and at new exhibitions in the future.
Thank you to Adrian for engaging with me in making this Blog post come to life.