Painting is like Cooking

PAINTING IS LIKE COOKING

FRANK CREBER

RECENT PAINTINGS

Painting is like cooking, you can have complicated ingredients and a simple method, or the other way round. You can follow a recipe closely or see what’s in the cupboard and use your knowledge and cooking skills and intuition to make a meal. 

My painting is a combination of internal and external motivations; the ingredients are found images of people that resonate with my memories and emotions, cityscapes that I have made on location in East London that carry an emotional bank of knowledge. The method is to create compositions in a collage technique that is guided more by an internally motivated chemistry than an externally motivated narrative. However it is story and sequential narrative that is my guiding principle.

“If we imagine what our nation would see as the home of our national character, it would be the small town, not the metropolis, or the wild countryside.” I heard this sentence on the radio the other day and it got me thinking.

Moving into Bromley by Bow in 1986, we ran a summer festival in the first year, and building on the success and the sense ‘that when something is born of the community it needs to be repeated’ - we did it the following year and the next 35 years after that. 

On the second year of the summer festival, some people commented to me that is wasn’t as good as it used to be, at the time I found this amusing. After all, running and being part of a local festival took a lot of personal commitment, and if it didn’t look like it was going to be as good - you had to work harder to make it good; recently I heard that to have had no regrets means that nothing has touched you deeply. 

I think the summer festivals were like a momentary bubble of Utopia, a market place for the community, sharing gossip, home made food and creativity. In fact a healthy community needs gateway experiences that become part of the narrative of neighbourhood life.

I ran a youth arts project for 11 years, every Thursday 7-9 pm, we made murals and large papier-mâché sculptures, sometimes trips out across London. On one occasion the mini bus took us past St. Pauls Cathedral, I pointed this out - some of the children responded by saying “do you mean St Paul’s Way School?” (the local primary School). Despite living in London E3, Zone 3 on the tube line, many local children had not been outside their ‘Village’ into the west end. 

We began to realise that London was like a series of small towns, to invest time and creativity at Bromley by Bow, to make a rich learning environment with local people, seemed and still proves to be an all encompassing and positive endeavour.

For me painting deals with how you negotiate pictorial space, however studio practice awakens questions that are also like the ingredients of the recipe; What are the Utopian moments for a community? and what are the elements that either threaten to undermine or enable our endeavour towards being a ‘mainstream, creative, healthy and enterprising community’? What makes up our National Character, and our need to be part of our small town?

This series of current paintings continues a 15 year personal chronicle, in the form of narrative figurative painting, along the way I have observed that it is healthy for theory and practice to dance together and for outcomes to be surprising, not determined from the start.