It is evident from titles like Community Picnic and Summer Festival that Frank Creber’s paintings often take their themes directly from his own experience of working as an artist in a community context in the East End of London. But far from dealing with inner city neglect and the down trodden and degraded, the emphasis here is more one of optimism and joyfulness. Figures, sometimes alone and sometimes in large complex compositions, inhabit a dreamlike space that is part parkland and part urban; the uncompromising tower blocks, motorways and flyovers, surveillance helicopters and abandoned motorcars take their place but they never overwhelm or seriously threaten.  

Starting from a simple idea of figures in a landscape or on the outskirts of the city, Creber draws on his memories of real places that he has visited and from Gabriele Basilico’s photographs of buildings in Milan, Berlin and Valencia. As he becomes involved in developing the painting the personality and the predicament of the people in the picture become focussed. As the artist has said: …

By the end of the process people are in a specific place telling a story through their body language and their relationship to the space and the objects around them… It is often only when a painting is finished that I am able to recognise the sources of the narrative and the painting’s reference to events, personalities and issues that have caught my imagination…

These paintings, although not intended as literal transcriptions, are reflections on normal life; yet, through their sense of innocence and heightened reality, they seem to offer an antidote to the mundanity of the everyday world.

Frank Creber was born in 1959 and trained at University of Newcastle upon Tyne (B.A in Painting 1981) and Chelsea College of Art (M.A. in Painting 1987) and has collected a number of prestigious awards: the Herbert Read Fellowship at Chelsea, Barclays Bank Young Painters Award and the Pickering Fellowship at Kingston University.