A creative University of Lincoln graduate is finishing a mini-tour of his artwork at a Lincoln coffee shop.
Sam Brewster, who graduated from his illustration course this year, is modest about the reaction to his exhibition, which will be displayed in Coffee Aroma from September 16th to September 30th: “Usually the kind of response I get is limited to one or two words of praise, or purely logistical feedback from an art director.”
The exhibition is called “The Life and Times of Mr. Nobody”. Lincoln is the last stop on the mini-tour, which has also been to Copenhagen and Sheffield. “It’s the product of collected sketches and ideas from the past year or so, manifested into some sort of cohesive body of work,” Brewster said.
“The ideas came to me when I found myself sketching out all these self-deprecating scenes of a repetitive, consumer lead lifestyle.”
However the artist denies he is trying to be anti-consumerist and finds that kind of righteous preaching tiresome: “It just came out that way. It’s all subjective.”
Choosing Coffee Aroma to showcase his latest work was easy for Brewster: “I spent a fair amount of time in there when I was at university in Lincoln, and I made a few good friends there. Along the way I somehow became acquatinted with Richard [Teasdale, the coffee shop’s manager], and when I was looking for places to exhibit the work on this mini-tour, Aroma was the first place that came to mind.”
He describes his university experience as “complicated, inspiring, infuriating, humbling and beautiful” and believes he found success in his industry due to his stubbornness: “I didn’t want to fall back on a ‘safe’ job and find myself, in a few years time, balding in a cubicle whilst grumbling about how I could do a better job than my superiors.”
Some people don’t see illustrations as proper art, but Brewster thinks they are in a minority: “I think illustration is generally considered to be ‘lowbrow’ art, created by the cretins that tattoo the landscape and the under-achievers filling up the back pages of exercise books with inane doodles.
“The perception changes wildly from person to person, but I think most people see it as a form of art.”