I’ve been drawing or painting since the age of 14, when I sketched the striking cover of Prince’s Lovesexy album, and was surprised to find it was a fair resemblance. I returned to Higher Education following the death of my father in 1997, ostensibly to study film at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design, now the University of Creative Arts.
During the foundation year, I rediscovered a love for painting and drawing, and decided to pursue Fine Art, being more attracted to its broad-based possibilities. During my BA I went from abstract painting to installations, video art to art theory, submitting a long dissertation as my final Masters project in 2003, ‘Perspectives of Intimacy in Contemporary Culture’.
In 2004, I accidentally emigrated to Istanbul for ten years, there working as a teacher and musician, releasing three albums and ultimately lecturing at Istanbul University and giving a TED talk (on Stammering and Creativity). After returning to the UK in 2014, I founded and ran the Seafish music and arts venue on the West Sussex coast in 2016, whose Blake Gallery put on local artists.
My cultural theory writing had started to centre on ‘culture war’ issues, which were hotting up due to the Brexit referendum and first Donald Trump win. Over the next few years, the intensity of the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, Covid and numerous other social phenomena led me back to painting, and the isolation of the Covid months/years led to a rebirth of the medium for me.
Oscar Wilde’s 1897 conviction and imprisonment, leading to his death, became a soul inspiration; as did the case of Clive Freeman, the UK’s longest-serving prisoner maintaining innocence. My impressions of both Wilde and Freeman are presented in Court Painter to the Counter Culture, as the stories of well-known cases jostled with less heard individuals - but I would try to capture them all the same.
As co-curator with Dr Michael Naughton of Empowering The Innocent’s Innocence Art project, I’m well aware of the cathartic, rehabilitative nature of art - in many cases that being the rehabilitation from miscarriage of justice. While twenty-plus years of internet prevalence has been an invigorating time for creativity, the legacy media becomes both more ‘captured’ and more predictable.
I use the internet for communication and joining people and ideas together, but I have an abiding love for the handmade, and the actual activity of painting. I don’t make art for an ‘elite’ art world, I make it for people who enjoy art. This doesn’t mean I play to the gallery: I just like to create things that exist in the real world, and make people think, but without going out of my way to shock. If someone is shocked by seeing a painting of Johnny Depp or Russell Brand that’s on them - offence is generally taken, rarely intentionally given.
Figures as disparate as the British writer Joanna Williams feature along with American Dilbert creator Scott Adams; well-known people from history such as George Orwell; and contemporary musicians such as Ken Stringfellow (REM/Posies/Big Star) and Damon Albarn.
While my more representative painting follows the same ‘post-woke’ themes as my ninth book, A Delicate Balance Of Reason, my abstracts are just that: experiments in form and colour that are about the paint and activity of painting itself, rather than trying to tell any particular story. I juxtapose the representational and abstract in Court Painter, forming a whole that I hope successfully communicates a certain depth of perspective.
Court Painter to the Counter Culture is available to pre-order here, for a limited time only: https://shop.snap-collective.com/en-gb/products/court-painter-to-the-counter-culture-by-sean-bw-parker
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