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Painting (MA)

Sam Creasey

As an artist situated within an abrasive and bustling metropolis like London, I utilise my art practise to make sense of the pace and complexities of the physical environment and the more technological networked spaces that make up the urban landscape. The relationship between human emotion and architecture and the required sociological considerations of urban planning influence the narratives I portray in my paintings. These narratives often consist of construction, gentrification advertising and rapid change.  

Urbanist Richard Sennett proposed that ‘Places’ are static and can be thought of as environments that we dwell in. ‘Spaces’ on the other hand are to be moved through. Working as a multi drop supermarket delivery driver, I often see the city space in motion, from the road and with the mode of labour in mind. Like a fly on the wall, this job offers a snapshot into the lives and localities of various others far and wide around the city. Addressing the question of labour, by endeavouring to amalgamate employed work with a creative output, in my case a painting practise, employment can feel less tedious. I aim to find an equilibrium between the two. Thinking about labour like performance or research as opposed to duty is key to the way I work.

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Degree Details

School of Arts & Humanities

Painting (MA)

The paintings presented in my Show2020 appropriate photographs, digital scans, and video stills taken from interactions with the city through the lens of my working life. As a painter, I see the act of making as a purgative and introspective kind of labour. This forms the culmination of an extended preliminary process, which is largely digital, and media based. In today’s modern cities, numerous smart city technologies are woven into the fabric of the environment. With this in mind I
explore the constantly reforming connection between the body, and the unforgiving municipal materials of steel, concrete, glass and fibre optic cable. 

Inspired by groups like the Situationist International and Guy Debord as well as more recent psychogeographers like Ian Sinclair, I encourage the same kind of drifting or ‘dérive’ prevalent in psychogeography when I experience the city. The only difficulty is that my journeys are often dictated and mapped by an algorithm on a driver’s handset. My routes are predetermined, and the goal is efficiency, not discovery. As a very financially centric city, London’s capitalistic bubble is seen both on my journeys and subsequently in my paintings through sprawls of large modern advertising screens that straddle the infrastructure. Making art in response is somewhat an attempt to negate the repetitive and impersonal slog of technology
and capital and direct these numbing dynamics into a creative and constructive narrative.  

Fractured and warped images of buildings, spaces, figures and objects combine in the work to portray the urban environment as an abstracted underbelly where stimuli overflow the senses. I am fond of the notion of ‘underbelly’ because It reveals what isn’t always seen on the surface of the city or the mask it wears. I find a good method to visualise this is with flatbed scanning – a method I use a lot in my work. Unlike with a way in which the camera sees, flatbed scanning requires close proximity and essential contact with the surface of the recorded object for clarity. It demands a consideration for the micro as well as the macro. Pressed against a ground nothing comes between the object that is being seen and the eye of the scanner which does the looking. Seeing from the ground up, the viewer is often placed underneath as if amongst the foundations of the cityscape, looking up at the detritus that leaks off the sprawling ebbs, flows and rhythms that form its totality.   

Install Image in studio

Oil on canvas - 125cm x 175cm - 2019

The huge spherical steel structure depicted is an advertising TV tower on Wandsworth roundabout and one of many scattered around London near large carriageways, roundabouts and intersections. Many of these dystopian pieces of architecture for me are a metonym for our current mode of modernism in their contemporary style and capitalistic purpose of advertising but also the use of the screen to communicate. Cars are often promoted on this rectangular box that levitates above the roundabout choking with cars circumnavigating its 3 lane accretion discs. The celestial language here is deliberate owing to the title taking after the name of the Milky Way’s centre star and also my star sign.

Medium:

Oil on Canvas

Size:

125cm x 175cm
blueCityCityscapedystopianInfrastructurerealismRoundaboutscreenSkystreetsurrealUrban

Oil and Laserjet print on thick Fabriano paper

Detail

The area of hyper construction activity at Nine Elms looked particularly grey when I walked there in December to take photographs. I’d been collecting used laughing gas canisters for years and had been meaning to feature them somewhere too. The old adage of never being more than 6 feet from a rat has been superseded by these curvy steel bullets that litter roads and parks.

Medium:

Oil and Laserjet print on thick Fabriano paper

Size:

82cm x 128cm

Install Image: Oil on thick Fabriano paper - 82cm x 64cm

Detail

Sales Pitch depicts another JC Decaux advertisement structure in Edgeware Road. The title for this piece is taken from a short story by Phillip K. Dick of the same name. The premise centres on omnipresent, intrusive and even aggressive marketing robots which plague the protagonist’s life and personal space. At the end of the story, the protagonist is driven mad by the robot who can forcefully and legally advertise itself until it is bought, and ‘no’ is not taken for an answer. As well as PKD, J.G. Ballard’s books offer a poignant and dystopian experience. Many of his books from early natural disaster fiction like The Drowned World (1962) , to later techno-dystopian novels like Crash (1973). Fiction in general is important for me to utilise. Many science fiction novels of the past brilliantly predict the oddities of today’s cold high-tech and industrial reality.

Medium:

Oil on thick Fabriano paper

Size:

82cm x 64cm

Install Image

Oil on thick Fabriano paper - 82cm x 64cm

A painting about temporal shifts made in the midst of one. Completed at the turn of the new decade 2019/2020 in early January.The piece uses the motif of the blossom tree here.

Medium:

Oil on thick Fabriano paper

Size:

82cm x 64cm

Install image: Oil on thick Fabriano paper - 82cm x 64cm

Detail

A painting that aims to capture the dynamism inherent in Londons busy interchanges. This road which heads towards the large Westfield roundabout in Shephards Bush is home to the JC Decaux / Zaha Hadid collaboration - a curvy metallic advertisement screen.

Medium:

Oil on thick Fabriano paper

Size:

82cm x 64cm

Install Image

Oil on canvas - 110cm x 130cm

Although this piece sticks out from the selection owing to the backdrop of the piece being an Evian/Paramount pictures style mountain range as opposed to a city scape, the original image was from a poster on a building site hoarding in Richmond advertising skiing holidays. The smooth curvy steel structures inherent in the TV tower paintings is here superimposed over the landscape to imagine a future dystopian wilderness. I think the success of the piece is found in the ambiguity of these tubes. Is it an oil pipeline? a tubular bell? Public art? A strange hybrid machine?

Medium:

Oil on canvas

Size:

110cm x 130cm

Oil on thick Fabriano paper - 82cm x 64cm

Detail

This painting references the way that cell towers are often disguised as trees in the urban environment. Often, they are painted earth green's and browns.

Medium:

Oil on thick Fabriano paper

Size:

82cm x 64cm

Oil on thick Fabriano paper - 82cm x 64cm

Detail

This work depicts the footbridge over the A12 that runs into Hackney Wick. Prior to the 2012 Olympics and the 2008 crash, Hackney wick as an area had the largest concentration of artist studios in the Europe. Following years of austerity, foreign investment, the slashing of arts and culture in the uk coupled with the shifts in property use and space, many of these Hackney studios have become and are becoming new housing developments at an alarming pace.

Medium:

Oil on thick Fabriano paper

Size:

82cm x 64cm

Oil on thick Fabriano paper

Detail

My father and I are lifelong Charlton Athletic Football fans. On match days, we make the same pilgrimage to SE7, walking the same route through the housing estate and adjacent rows of traditional Victorian houses. I recently set myself the game of finding the house with the most pristine Victorian tiled pathway to reference for this painting. I have always been drawn to these tiles because they make a statement of beauty, tradition and quality. With the ever-sprawling gentrification engulfing London with cost effective functionality, traditional decorative masonry and tiles may soon become a thing of the past.

Medium:

Oil on thick Fabriano paper

Size:

82cm x 64cm

Installation at the Dyson Gallery: Royal College of Art Battersea for Future Archive group exhibition. 'Substrate' - Wood, Sandbags, Hooks, Ratchet Straps. Two Paintings (125cm x 175cm + 100cm x 150cm) September 2019

Foundations - Soft Paster and charcoal on paper - 82cm x 64cm - 2019

Substrate - Oil, sand and enamel spray on canvas - 125cm x 175cm - 2019

FA is an ongoing inter-disciplinary research project led by Rut Blees Luxemburg that follows the building of the new RCA Battersea site designed by Herzog De Meuron I documented photographs around the time that the pile driver was digging the foundations for the main structure. For other artists and I in the collaborative like Diego Valente, the ground and the substrate with its rich history became a source of inspiration. In the case of the Battersea site the leakage from the former petrol station which stood nearby affected the topography of the ground and the quality of the earth. At this point I knew I wanted to place the viewer of my work in the ground. Using a flatbed scanner helped achieve this owing to the nature by which it looks anyway. It pans across and projects light upwards onto its subject and captures its underbelly.

For the Future Archive group show in the Dyson Gallery, I displayed a painting which I titled ‘Substrate’, made with oil paint and sand that directly references a scan I had made of a building contractors’ hand from the site. Whilst on a macro scale, the act of scanning straddles a mechanical body against something biological and human in order to create and to produce a result, the same relationship occurs at a much grander scale on building sites. workers interact and control large heavy machinery like cranes, diggers and pile drivers. Thinking about the body in relation to the site exacerbated the gulf between the rigidity and violence of municipal materials when pitched against the softness and comparative frailty of skin and bone. This need for awareness, safety, protection and strength was at bay when considering the structure in which the paintings sit. The cross in the structure created with the ratchet straps and the guy rope and sandbag system self-strengthened the work and gave it a spine. Without building this way, the whole unit flopped and swayed around. I liked to think of the installation as a mini construction site in itself within the confines of the gallery.

The Rat Race Triptych: x3 55cm x 70cm paintings.

Launch Project

Everted Ground - Oil on canvas - 55cm x 70cm - 2019

Central - Oil on canvas - 55cm x 70cm - 2019

Personal Effects - Oil on canvas - 55cm x 70cm - 2019

A piece about motion, speed and the commute

Medium:

Oil on canvas

Size:

3 x 55cm 70cm canvas paintings
23 July 2020
14:00 (GMT + 0)

HoP Around with Alexandria Smith

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