Artist of the Month: Chuck Elliott

Our featured Artist of the Month is Cotham-based graphic artist Chuck Elliott.

Chuck has been creating digital art since 1989, after a chance encounter with the UK’s first Apple computer sparked a lifelong passion for creating sculptural, modernist forms using technology.

“I launched myself into the world of commercial art and design, in studios around Soho and Clerkenwell,” he says of his early 90’s beginnings. “In 2005, I moved back west, and found that with the cost of living here being significantly lower than in London, I could work on my art project full time using the techniques and technology that I’d previously used for commercial illustration to create works for gallery display.”

As he saw digital technology altering the production of films and music, he decided to create similar changes in fine art. He wanted to “suffuse it with new, post-modern digital works that would have some kind of contemporary digital feel, but also encompass a strong sense of history.”

This led to the creation of Chuck’s vibrant, swirling and often pleasingly symmetrical pieces, crafted in a spare room in the artist’s home using pencil drawings, digital editing and even mathematics. 

“Maths is important here, and I’ll often use Excel to create number rhythms or patterns to hang the geometry on,” he explains. “There may be a grid, or offset grid, that somehow encapsulates a particular sequence of numbers, much like a rhythm or beat.” 

Chuck’s main piece, Elemental /White Crest (above), a pigment print on fine art paper, will be exclusively available in our online shop for £180 – half its usual retail price. Eight more of his works will soon also be on sale at the Bristol24/7 shop for heavily discounted prices, with prices ranging from £400 to £2,400. The discounts are offered in order to raise money for Chuck’s charity of choice, Shelter. Ten percent of all sales – both those of his main piece and of his eight other works – will go to the charity.

The artist looks forward to offering his artwork in his home city of Bristol, where Chuck finds himself inspired by vibrant arts scene. 

“There seems to be a vast diaspora of people making stuff, at established studios like Spike, PRSC, Hamilton House and BV, but also all over the city,” he says. “It’s a beautifully anarchic grass roots culture that takes little notice of the neo liberal capitalist strictures of the wider society, and just gets on with doing its own thing.”

Currently, Chuck is working on a motion-based colour field project called Lumina and plans to create a new Experimental Print Club that sends members four new pieces of digital art each year. 

To buy the exclusive Elemental /White Crest here.

You can also still buy work from our previous Artists of the Month, Phil Nicholls, Mike Godwin, Clare Cutts and Carol Peace.

Support Chuck Elliot’s Experimental Print Club on Patreon at www.patreon.com/chuck_elliot

Artist of the Month is put together in association with Smithson Gallery www.smithsongallery.co.uk