Frank Creber's Page

Website

http://www.artspacegallery.co.uk

Relationship status

married

Member type

Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?

Painting

I am...

I am an Artist and Creative Director at Bromley By Bow Centre, a pioneering voluntary organisation led by the local community. Established in 1984, the centre has, over the years, developed an innovative model to regenerate the area. Our aim is that Bromley By Bow will become a healthy, learning community within the economic mainstream.

see www.bbbc.org.uk

I have recently been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for my work in Youth and Public Arts.

About my artwork

In 2005 Frank Creber was appointed the official artist in residence until 2012 for Water City, an ambitious new re-development programme centred around a network of local waterways in east London. Extending from the Olympic Park in the north to East India Dock in the south, the East End is once again being subjected to the force of rapid urban renewal which Creber is recording through drawings and paintings as the project develops; a project driven by a vision to create a true legacy for east London, both physical and social.

But as an artist with over twenty years experience of working within a community group in a deprived neighbourhood in Bow, Creber is equally committed to making works that explore a deeply urban affair between a new world created in the pursuit of progress and modernity and the community that it is setting out to serve. A community whose optimism is by no means universal because they have seen before that the developers’ bulldozers can just as easily destroy the inner-city infrastructure geared to serving local needs.

Creber often allows his imagination to float high above the city looking down on figures in the foreground that cavort on scaffold structures set against a pattern of roads, the Millennium Dome, housing and construction sites of the cityscape below that provide a metaphoric embodiment of individual defiance and bloody-mindedness. They are apart from the turmoil being created around them. Alternatively, he reflects the fears of the community by presenting a city terrorised by the developer; a city in which older buildings and older communities struggle to hold their own against the forces of change.

A key to the relationship that Frank Creber has to the East End and its community lies in his role as Creative Director at the celebrated Bromley by Bow Centre where he was one of the founding artists in 1986. He 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 he has collected a number of prestigious awards: the Herbert Read Fellowship at Chelsea, Barclays Bank Young Painters Award and the Pickering Fellowship at Kingston

Artists I like

Delacroix, Poussin, Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, Guston, Kiefer....

Interests

Sailing

What exhibitions are good at the moment?

Duchamp at Tate Modern

Centre of the artworld:

London