Instagram story viewer> @charleypeters> Posts

Charley Peters | Artist / Public Art

@charleypeters

18.5K

followers

5846

following

Paintings & public artworks exploring perception and post-digital culture.
Head of Graduate School @cglartschool
Lead Mentor @turpseastsussex

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

What happens when a machine dreams up a painting?

My recent works start with images created from my reflections on digital culture: uncanny hybrids of broken tech, organic debris, and invented artefacts. I paint from them in oil, slowly and carefully. Rebuilding these hallucinations into something material.

The result isn’t realistic, exactly—it’s something more unstable. Something dredged from a future ruin, or a baroque VR simulation.

Are we seeing memory? prediction? or just the machine’s guess at what we want to see? Painting feels like a way to test the image, to slow it down and see what survives the translation.

Crashed My Heart, Still Rendering…
2025
Oil on canvas
65cm x 75cm

#contemporarypainting #artandtechnology #digitalculture #artiststudio #contemporaryabstraction #postdigital #stilllifepainting #vanitaspainting by @charleypeters

3

66

a year ago

If you’d like to keep up with the latest news from my studio you can subscribe to my newsletter via the link in my bio.

🌟 Subscribers get behind-the-scenes information from the studio, forthcoming project news, previews of newly available works and subscriber-only discounts when buying works directly from my studio
-
-
#abstractpainting #artnow #collecteurs #womanartist #interiormilk #contemporarypainting #contemporaryart #luxurylifestyle #creativevibes #artiststudio #artaddict #coolinteriors #creativity #brandcollaboration #interiordesign #creativepreneur #creativeminds #collectibleartist #artcollectorlondon #artadvisor #dailyinterior #contemporaryartcollectors #subscriber #subscribenow taken in London, United Kingdom by @charleypeters

3

19

4 years ago

⭐️ I’m very excited to share a new public artwork now installed @wembleyparkldn in celebration of #InternationalWomensDay.

Power Up! (2022), is a site specific work made for Wembley’s Spanish Steps as part of a new art trail curated by @zoedolcevita of @artistic_statements featuring 8 new artworks made by 16 women artists.

💪 In Power Up! a succession of shooting stars rise up in recognition of the perseverance and resilience of women’s voices. Using a spectrum of colour to acknowledge a diversity of women’s experiences, the stars move upwards in an arrangement of solidarity for International Women’s Day 2022. It is a positive, uplifting artwork employing a motif that is simultaneously futuristic and otherworldly, and also familiar from everyday popular graphics in video games, super hero costumes and science fiction. The title reminds us that there is strength in coming together with others and finding our own power within our individual life journeys.

😎 I hope that you can see the work in person during its time at Wembley Park, and also enjoy the amazing artworks by the other epic women artists that are part of the trail.

❤️ Happy International Women’s Day to everyone celebrating amazing women today and every day ❤️
-
-
#internationalwomensday #publicart #art #femaleartist #arttrail #streetart #graphicart #graphicdesign #womenartists #womenart #painting #charleypeters #publicartcommission #artandarchitecture #urbanarchitecture #artadvisor #artinstallation #inspiringwomen #artpower #powerup #powerfulwoman #sitespecificart #spanishsteps #artinsitu #iwd2022 #creativewomen #creativityeveryday #wembleypark #wembleystadium taken in Wembley Park by @charleypeters

3

153

5 years ago

I’m delighted to be included in Artist to Artist: Interviews on Art with Contemporary British Painters, a new book by Robert Priseman.

Robert and I had a really interesting conversation about the relationship between painting and computing, making art for public spaces, emotional courage, painting in a dissociated state, and all sorts of other things that I think about in the studio.

The book brings together interviews with contemporary British painters, offering insights into their ideas, working processes and the many different ways of approaching painting. I’m really pleased to be in such good company!

Robert is the co-founder of the Priseman Seabrook Collection of 21st Century British Painting, the only collection in the UK dedicated exclusively to painting produced in Britain since 2000.

The book is available now from Art UK, and there’s lots of excellent reading in there.

#ContemporaryPainting #BritishPainting #PaintingPractice #ArtistInterviews #contemporaryart by @charleypeters

3

7

11 hours ago

I’m delighted to be joining @turpseastsussex as Lead Mentor for 2026/27.

Last Friday we welcomed our new and returning painters to Hastings Contemporary for the beginning of another year of creative development, experimentation and critical dialogue.

One of the things I love about working with other artists is that creative development rarely follows a straight line. It requires curiosity, courage, a willingness to question what we think we know, and the confidence to embrace uncertainty. And while making art can be a solitary activity, developing a practice doesn’t have to be.

I’m really looking forward to working alongside a brilliant community of painters and mentors, making space for experimentation, generous conversations and new possibilities.

Here’s to a year of taking risks, asking better questions and discovering where our work might take us 🎨💫

#TurpsEastSussex #ArtistDevelopment #Painting #ArtsEducation taken in East Sussex by @charleypeters

125

10

a day ago

The MA Show @cglartschool is open for a few more days, until Saturday 12th September.

It’s been a real pleasure to see this year’s MA students bring their work together across Fine Art, Carving, and Conservation. A degree show is always more than the work you see at the end of it. It’s the result of months of testing things out, changing direction, getting stuck, starting again, having difficult conversations with the work and, eventually, knowing when to stop.

One of the best parts of my role as Head of Graduate School is getting to see that process unfold across such different practices and disciplines. This year’s show is thoughtful, ambitious, challenging, meticulous and full of personality, and the students have made something that feels very much their own.

It’s also been lovely seeing the building fill up with visitors over the past couple of days and watching people encounter the work that we’ve been living alongside all year.

If you haven’t made it down yet, there are still a few days to see it. And to this year’s graduating students: you have all done SO well ❤️

MA Show 2026
City & Guilds of London Art School
Open until Saturday 12th September

#contemporaryart #carving #conservation #ArtSchool #ArtsEducation taken in City & Guilds of London Art School by @charleypeters

3

11

a month ago

My new Substack essay begins with a simple question: why does something we know isn’t physically there still feel present?

From ABBA’s digital bodies, it moves through the nineteenth-century stage illusion Pepper’s Ghost, telegraph engineer and spiritualist Cromwell Fleetwood Varley, and the automatic drawings of Alma Rumball.

New technology, same weird humans, still fascinated by the possibility that somebody might somehow be here and not here at the same time. Give it a read if you like the same strange stuff as me 👻🪩

We Are Not Our Bodies From Victorian séances to ABBA Voyage: our fascination with being somewhere we’re not

New on Substack, link in my bio

#artwriting #digitalculture #abbavoyage #automaticdrawing #artistresearch by @charleypeters

3

13

a month ago

Some recent images from the studio: paintings, drawings, oil sketches, notebook pages and things in various states of becoming.

I’ve spent a lot of the summer reading and writing too, piecing together some thoughts on Substack around haunting, technology, simulation and visual culture, and thinking about how those ideas might feed back into the studio. Give them a read if your interests send you down similar research rabbit holes.

Reading, writing and making are all parts of the same process for me. Increasingly, I’m interested in how research can change the way a painting is made, rather than simply providing a context for it. Coloured grounds, fragments of things and half-formed thoughts are appearing in the studio slowly over time.

Recent painting: An Offering to the Simulation, 2026, oil on canvas, 75 × 60 cm.

#contemporarypainting #artiststudio #artistresearch #digitalculture #artwriting by @charleypeters

3

13

2 months ago

Revisiting Quantum Frequency, my public artwork for Accelerator Park in Sawston, Cambridge. 
I’ve been doing lots of drawings in the studio lately as a way of working things out, so it felt like a good time to look back at some of the drawings behind this project. The final artwork began with a visual language borrowed from scientific diagrams, early computing graphics and vintage textbooks: atoms, circuits, orbits, networks and other forms that seem to describe something, even when it isn’t entirely clear what that something is.

Alongside my own drawings, workshops with students from Icknield Primary School and members of the local community generated another collection of invented machines, systems, diagrams and symbols. I loved seeing the different ways people imagined what science might look like.

These ideas gradually became six large-scale artworks, fabricated into laser-cut aluminium panels with perforated metal mesh behind them. Each panel is almost three metres wide, so there’s quite a leap between the loose little drawings and the finished objects.

One of the things I enjoy most about public art is that movement between scales and materials. Something that begins as a scribble on paper can eventually become part of a building, a street or a place that people encounter every day.

Quantum Frequency, Accelerator Park, Sawston, Cambridge. With thanks to Canmoor, Greater Cambridge Shared Planning, @artcontactltd, @igmaimaging and @creative_return for their collaboration on the project.

#PublicArt #ContemporaryArt #ArtAndScience #PublicArtist #ArtInPublicSpace taken in Sawston, Nr Cambridge by @charleypeters

3

21

2 months ago

Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of ghost stories while I paint, specifically podcasts in which ordinary people recount their encounters with ghosts.

Somewhere between the studio, nineteenth-century spiritualism, Susan Hiller, Poltergeist, holograms, algorithms and AI, I started wondering if every generation invents the ghosts it needs.

My new essay on Substack isn’t really about ghosts. It’s about the invisible systems we live alongside every day, the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of them, and the role art plays in giving form to things we can’t quite explain.

I hope you enjoy it 👻
(Link in my bio)

#ArtResearch #ContemporaryArt #StudioPractice #VisualCulture #GhostStories by @charleypeters

3

5

2 months ago

What happens after Minimalism?

If Minimalism gave us the visual language of an industrial world, what kind of painting makes sense in an age of algorithms, networks and invisible systems?

My latest article on Substack explores that question through Donald Judd, Jack Burnham, Amy Sillman and Eva Hesse, arguing that contemporary painting hasn’t abandoned abstraction so much as evolved it. Along the way, I realised the essay also helped me understand a shift in my own work over the past decade.

🔗 You can read the full text via the link in my bio.

#PaintingTheory #ContemporaryPainting #Minimalism #DonaldJudd #AmySillman by @charleypeters

3

17

3 months ago

It’s always good to see this book finding its way into artists’ studios!

I was delighted to contribute a chapter on being an artist and a parent, which is something that rarely gets talked about with much honesty, despite how many artists are trying to balance creative ambition with caring responsibilities. It’s a subject that’s very close to my own experience, and one I hope offers a bit of reassurance, as well as some practical advice.

If you’re starting out, or trying to build a sustainable creative practice alongside the rest of life, I think you’ll find plenty worth reading in this book from @delphiangallery

#theartistsroadmap #artbusiness #artcareer #thamesandhudson #artwriting by @charleypeters

3

6

3 months ago