The Palm Tree Painting

In 2005 Frank Creber was appointed Director of Visual Arts for Water City CIC, leading on a programme of collaborative, educational and exhibition events, which to date have involved over 1,000 children and 200 Artists and musicians. 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 community groups 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. A key to the relationship that Frank Creber has to the East End and its community lies in his role as Creative Director (up to 2010) at the celebrated Bromley by Bow Centre where he was one of the founding artists in 1986. He continues as a lead Artist for the Centre. Frank 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. In 2008 Frank Creber was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, for his work in Community Arts with Young People.