About Adam De Ville

There's a quiet steadiness to Adam De Ville's work that catches you on second look. A green pear, a cafe corner in Conwy, a jar of Marmite on the kitchen counter — small subjects, painted with thick, deliberate impasto and a colour palette that never raises its voice. The longer you look, the more you find.

Self-taught and Midlands-born, Adam now paints from a studio in Canterbury, Kent. His range is wide — landscape, abstract, portrait, figurative, cityscape — but his method is the same across all of it: paint what catches your eye, paint how it makes you feel, and trust the heart and hand to do the rest. "Anything goes," he says, "so long as it's driven by the heart and hand."

That conviction has been quietly recognised across the British art establishment. Adam is an Associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (ARBSA), and an award winner there as well as at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, Wales Contemporary, and the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art. His work has been selected for the ING Discerning Eye, the New English Art Club and the Pastel Society, and shown in galleries from London to Dublin to Paris.

For Eye Feast 2026 Adam is showing three works, each a small portrait of a moment with food. I Love Marmite, You Don't is exactly what it says on the jar — a household disagreement made paint. What a Pear catches a single piece of fruit mid-thought, looking, in Adam's own words, like it's "putting in a little dance." And At the Conwy Pantry is a tender little portrait of breakfast in North Wales: a couple at a corner table, full Englishes ordered, tea on the way. Anyone who's ever had a Saturday like that will recognise it instantly.

Three works, three moods, one painter who knows exactly what he's doing.