Arthur Sangster

Year of birth: 1990
Where do you live: Chicago, United States
Your education: BFA in New Studio Practice, Milwaukee Institute of Art And Design, 2019
Describe your art in three words: Raw, Personal, Colorful
Your discipline: Painting
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Arthur Sangster, Ghosted

How has your upbringing in Saint Louis, MO, influenced your approach to art and the themes you explore in your work?

I want to say that my upbringing in St.Louis influenced my work or how I approached it. By growing up in an environment that was hetero centric and toxic masculine, Queer identity wasn’t really a topic, except for when it was discussed in a demeaning way through some people my age, within my neighborhood as a kid and the older people on the persona non grata side of my family, especially, regarding religious justification for their anti-LGBTQ mentality. One side of the family is different from the other; I am closer to my mom’s side and they’ve been supportive of me. when I came out about my sexual orientation during my late teens and early 20’s.

So, I used this experience I’ve had with my upbringing to create themes in my paintings like: how religion played a part of me suppressing my true self, and expressing many aspects of being a gay person navigating dating while being fresh and young out of the closet. Having a boyfriend who I was off and on with, then he had ghosted me, only to hear about him passed away at a really young age.

Your paintings often incorporate text and figurative elements. How do you decide which quotes or phrases to include in your works, and what role does text play in your storytelling?

My decision to use quotes in my works are based on if they are relatable to the story about a specific situation within a painting and the role text plays in my storytelling is the fact that the figure said the quote has been in a similar situation that is related to the painting. Quotes in my work serve the role of getting the viewer to spend a little more time with my painting as if it is a short story about  a person or a particular experience. At least that the idea I am going for when  I place quotes or phrases into my work. 

Arthur Sangster, Cloud Leisure Afternoon Leisure

What is your creative process like? Do you start with a concept, a specific quote, or an emotion when creating a new piece?

My creative process is reliving past experience or present experiences or what I’ve seen from being active on  apps like: glowlr and twitter (now x), taking those elements from the process along with research for the topic, and using those things as a part of my concept for a work.

I think about a specific quote or lyric from a song, even. Then I would take my sketchbook and play around with compositions with the text and figures in the sketch, then I pick a color combination that relates to the subject matter for my paintings. And colored the sketch with color pencils to get an idea of how it will look.  I used to make a sketch with oil paint on canvas paper, but I haven’t done that lately. I just do the sketch in my book and then go straight to painting.

You’ve participated in group shows in Chicago and beyond. How has being part of these creative communities impacted your artistic growth?

It made me realize that I am on the right path and I just have to do work exploring how to create more of a story in my work. At least that’s what I’ve been told by a residency I have applied for, but I didn’t make the final rounds for the selection process. But they give me a critique regarding this.

Could you explain how your experiences on dating apps have shaped the visual language of your paintings?

My experiences on the dating apps influenced the visual language in my work by being a documentation of things sent to me by people on the app, like I have made a painting of a guy messaging me a bunch of times to have a video chat and to open my private pics. In some of the paintings I’ve done, I have taken elements like: color design and logos from the apps I used. Incorporated them into a painting with a image box or text of imaging  what will be my reaction to them in my head, for example:  In one painting I’ve painted an image of myself as Saturn devouring a person who send me a picture of them giving another BIPOC gay man fellatio, within the painting.

Arthur Sangster, SADA

As a recipient of the David and Reva Logan Foundation Grant, how has this recognition influenced your practice or opened new opportunities?

It helped get me into shows and made me take my artistic career more seriously, despite I have a BFA and a dean at every critique lecture that remind us that we owed it to ourselves to create our work that influence taking my practice serious, but being a recipient of this grant really nailed down what i have been advised by my professors to be or do as an artist.

What is your vision for the evolution of your art practice in the coming years? Are there new themes or mediums you’d like to explore?

My vision for the evolution in my practice is to hopefully have a sustainable successful career and continue to have the ability  to produce my work and grow as an artist, work on bigger paintings and hopefully get my work into a well-known and admired gallery in major art capitals of the world. Right now, I am going to do figure paintings of Gay BIPOC men who i am friends with as a part of a series that is influenced by concepts from Romanticism. 

I want to work with ink, oil pastels, pencil, charcoal and powder graphite and maybe be able to have the skill to work with spray paint, I am pretty open ended with the mediums I would like to explore. I know I would like to do more work with gouache and do more mixed media works.

I would like to write more, especially poetry and maybe do a comic zine.