Fused - Archive - Si Peplow

Having skateboarded his way through school, abandoned a University course and ran away to America, 26-year-old Birmingham based illustrator and co-curator of the Outcrowd Collective, Simon Peplow has always nurtured a huge artistic talent. We caught up with him to talk about dysfunctionality, disillusionment, his distinctive style and his, er, rather ‘befuddled noggin’… enjoy!

What is your background?
I’m a procrastinator. Four years at Art College followed by three years immersed on a BA Honors in Visual Communication at the Birmingham Institute of Art & Design. It’s flipping retarded, 7 years in further education. If only I had got my act together at school I could have been a doctor or something by now, getting creative with peoples intestines instead of counting my coppers.

Describe the artwork you do?
Characters are fundamental to my work. They enable me to communicate and express my random thoughts, feelings and quandaries at any given moment, tapping into the human condition. I try to keep my work as simple as possible, leaving just a few words to loosely convey what the image is about. I am a pretty dysfunctional being at the best of times and find it difficult to adapt to the day to day running of the modern world, so I tend to mooch along in my own little place where everything makes just a little more sense. I'm pretty disillusioned with city life, the way we treat Mother Earth and each other on a daily basis, so this is my justification for why the majority of the characters I draw tend to hold blank stares of bewilderment.

You have a very distinctive style - where does this come from?
Somewhere inside the vacuous vacuum of my befuddled noggin. I'm not really too sure. I loved old Disney and Warner Brothers cartoons as a child; the solid black outlines and beautiful, vibrant colours used on the various cartoon characters demanded my attention. I would come home from school, sit myself in front of the television for an hour or so sporting a monstrous grin and copy them as best I could. So I've had this cartoonesque style of drawing instilled in me from a pretty young age, I suppose. It was after I began skateboarding in 1992 and then embarked on a degree that my style was allowed to purposefully develop into what it is today.

Who are the characters that appear in your work - are they based on anyone?
No, not really. The characters just tumble from my imagination for my own amusement. When you're spending a lot of time in your own company you need to have a sense of humour, otherwise you begin harbouring symptoms of extreme doolallyness. I've come within a whisker on many occasions.

You’re one of the founders of the Outcrowd Collective - how did that come about?
I bumped into an old friend, Master Lawrence Roper (Logger), who I hadn't seen in a while and explained that I was looking to have a solo exhibition somewhere in Birmingham towards the end of my final year at Uni. He informed me that he owned a coffee shop/gallery in the Custard Factory which had been exhibiting various artists work for some time and would I like to have a show in there. I realised I had some ridiculously talented friends in the same rickety boat as myself, who could also use some help to promote their work, so I spoke to Log about collecting a group of image makers from various disciplines, whose work we both liked, to create an exciting and varied group show that offered something new to the beady retinas of Birmingham. Log managed to secure the main Gallery in the Custard Factory, the name for the collective came from the vacuous vacuum in my befuddled noggin I mentioned earlier. Flyers flew far and wide and a frenzy of faffing followed, and so in February 2004 the Outcrowd was spawned!

How is it for you being based in Birmingham - how do you feel about the art community?
I find it pretty static and frustrating most of the time. If you belong to a gallery or a design studio I guess it’s a lot different. There are not enough cheap studio spaces available to artists. For the second biggest city, we have a long way to go until we can offer the same opportunities as London, In regards to galleries, publishing houses, funding and exhibition spaces. You can count Birmingham’s on one hand, the Mac, the Ikon Gallery and the Custard Factory, which remains stagnant for a large part of the year. As a whole Birmingham has a very incestuous art community, because it’s so small. Beat13 are the only credible outfit achieving what we are aiming to achieve and they’ve been grafting for years to establish themselves. So there isn’t much choice for an illustrator but to find alternative ways of surviving outside of his/her own city.

Is your love of skateboarding an important part of your artwork?
Maybe not so much now, but it definitely laid down solid foundations for me to work from. Instilling a D.I.Y ethic, I certainly wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now if it hadn’t been such an important part of my adolescent years. Skateboarding is inherently creative. Good or bad, it gave me the freedom to view my surroundings in a different way, meet a variety of people from very diverse backgrounds, in turn forcing me to view and tackle things in life/art in an exciting and original way. I am eternally grateful for this. It has led to many opportunities - being included in a group book published by Laurence King in November, titled 'Concrete to Canvas-Skateboarders Art' was a highlight. (See http://www.concretetocanvas.co.uk/ for more info).

Who are your design / art heroes?
Skate related artists I admire are Barry McGee, Mark Gonzales, Ed Templeton, Thomas Campbell, and Maya Hayuk. I’m also really interested in Outsider artists (self taught visionaries) like Edmund Monsiel, Oswald Tschirtner, Johann Hauser, Albert Louden, Adolf Wolfli and Gaston Chaissac who create mind-boggling works directly from their subconscious. James Jarvis is of course someone who has become very successful in the field of contemporary illustration and design, creating his own brand and branching out into the vinyl figure market. So you’d be hard pushed not to fully respect what he has achieved. Then there are illustrators like Henrik Drescher and painter Friedensreich Hundertwasser who are ticking all the right boxes for me at the moment. My friends, many of which are fellow tinkerers, also play an enormous part in inspiring me to keep on keeping on.

Check out http://www.outcrowdcollective.com/ for details of forthcoming exhibitions.

Image credit: OKSuburban Bliss!