Charley Peters: Artist Q&A

Could you talk a bit about your background, and what inspired you to become an artist?

I’ve always wanted to be an artist, it’s all I can remember thinking I’d do in my life. I grew up in a big city and spent a lot of time indoors drawing in my bedroom. My mum left home when I was very young and I withdrew into my own world, I remember that drawing made me feel incredibly happy. I drew amazing imaginary worlds full of spaceships, robots and dinosaurs and never wanted to stop. I always found school very difficult as I was crippled with shyness and anxiety but when I was 15 I had a brilliant art teacher, who was such a cool, ballsy, inspiring woman and she encouraged me to go to art school. It was like I’d finally found some freedom to be ‘me’. I love that being an artist allows you to have a voice, no matter how awkward or weird you feel in your own head. Art gives me a lot of energy, when I’m in the studio I always feel like I’m bursting with ideas about paintings to make next.

Could you describe the development of your vision as an artist?

I think visions, philosophies, methodologies – all the stuff that makes your work unique to you – are things that just grow over time. My concerns as a painter are quite formal, I’m concerned with how different things look and feel on the canvas when they are put next to each other and I love the endless possibilities that gives to make subsequent works. I’m really interested in how abstraction has changed over time, from being something that was once radical and innovative to now being a familiar, known language. But I don’t think I started making work with that intention in the beginning, I’m sure that I just do things and see what happens. I definitely do first and think later..

What are the main influences for your work right now? What do you do, or where do you go to find creative inspiration?

This is a difficult question because it maybe implies that I’m consciously aware of influences when I don’t necessarily think I am. I think it’s more like over time I’ve absorbed an internal archive of material that has resonated with me – great abstract artworks from art history, things I watched on TV as a kid, video games I used to play, city lights at night time, graphics in teenage magazines. It’s a mixture of learned influences that were endorsed academically at art school alongside more every day, populist and low brow material.

What does the word ‘perfectionism’ mean to you?

It’s such an interesting word! In some ways I would never relate it to what I do, although there is precision in what I make, it feels incidental – just how it comes out, and not intended as a ‘style’ or approach to painting. For me the process of working is quite chaotic, my studio is usually messy and I’m a bit clumsy and haphazard, I knock things over and tread in paint all the time. ‘Perfectionism’ has some negative connotations as a word, of being uptight or unforgiving, which I don’t relate to personally. However, what I do like about the term, and especially in the context of this exhibition, is that it recognises and values technical skill in painting, and that’s not always been a fashionable thing to talk about in recent years. And no matter how untidy the experience of me making a painting is, it does somehow end up with a refined aesthetic. I always feel like a painting is finished when I’ve organised the chaos that I’ve felt while working on it…so maybe that’s me reaching my own ‘perfection’.

What has your experience been like working on an online exhibition as opposed to a physical exhibition?

The main difference is that you don’t get a sense of the relationships between pieces in the same way that you would if they were hung in a physical gallery space, and no sense of scale either. Perfectionism does a good job of showing details of the work, which helps to explain the surface of the paintings – this is helpful to get a sense of what the works look like in real life. In other ways though it’s not such a strange experience. Most of us who make things by hand have used social media for several years to reach different audiences so have already embraced the screen as a medium by which people see painting. It’s important to me that painting remains relevant and forward looking so the recent process of normalising seeing paintings on screen has felt very positive to me. And of course, my work probably has borrowed some of its visual language from the screen, so I’m also interested to see things  relocated there.

What has been your most exciting or interesting lockdown discovery?

Listening to more podcasts, speaking to friends more (albeit on screen) and drinking wine in the afternoons. There’s lots of things that I don’t miss, like public transport and generally feeling rushed. I’ve been grateful to have a rare time to slow down and focus. Overall, It’s been a positive time, I think when the normal rules don’t apply it gives us more control to make our own rules to suit us an individuals and I think I’ve been doing this, I’ve been pleased to have had a kind of rebirth and have made some changes that will last beyond lockdown.