Frank Creber’s vigorous figure compositions are inspired by his experience as an artist working within a community group in a deprived neighbourhood in London. The emphasis however is one of optimism and joyfulness, rather than inner city neglect, the down trodden or the degraded.

In this new series of paintings his imagination floats high above the city looking down to figures in the foreground set against the pattern of roads, housing and construction sites of the cityscape below. The group of figures that inhabit the scaffold are informed by his knowledge of East End communities who, despite their predicament, invariably seem to find ways to cope, hold-on, climb through, survive and celebrate.

The cityscape that Creber’s people inhabit is visionary, with elements of the city that threaten human sensibility set against aspects of Utopia. Creber comments that,

…in ‘Estuary’ for example first of all I had to imagine something that wasn’t there and then re-live the memory of a strong emotional experience based in past reality. The invented image may be that of people on a bridge, but as I composed elements in the pictorial space the painting became focussed through the actual experience of entering a real estuary somewhere on the Atlantic coast of Spain.

Frank Creber was born in 1959 and trained at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (B.A. in painting 1981) and Chelsea College of Art (M.A. in painting 1987). He has collected a number of prestigious awards including the Herbert Read Fellowship at Chelsea, Barclays Bank Young Painters Award and the Pickering Fellowship at Kingston University. This will be his second solo exhibition at Art Space Gallery.