His involvement with art became all-consuming. At the age of sixteen, Creme decided to leave school to devote all of his energies to painting. He attended life classes, joined a painting club and, as he said, “painted day and night”. Although originally drawn to abstract expression, he used this time to hone his drawing skills. This led, in 1940, to his mounting his first exhibition, with his good friend Douglas Campbell (who later became an actor/director) at a Trade Union Club in Glasgow. The noted Polish painter Josef Herman saw Creme’s work there and returned with his friend, the renowned Polish artist Jankel Adler, who in turn introduced Creme’s work to J.D. Ferguson, the well-known Scottish painter. Adler took a liking to Creme’s work, saying their work was “in the same vein, in the same direction.” Thereafter, Adler became a valued mentor and friend.
Under Adler’s influence in the early 1940s Creme was inspired by his mentor’s mature European modernism. He was especially drawn to Adler’s effective blending of the wit of Paul Klee with the tough formal qualities of Picasso. The abstract, cubist art of Georges Braque also engaged his attention.
The 1940s witnessed something of a hotbed in Glasgow and London for developing young artists. In 1942, Creme and Robert Frame, another young Glasgow painter, illustrated a book of poetry, Cage Without Grievance, by W.S. Graham. Creme became friends with Graham, Dylan Thomas, David Gascoyne and others, some of whom visited him in Glasgow.
In 1945, Creme moved to London with Peggy his first wife, and set up his studio in Battersea. Through his association with Adler, Creme continued to be a part of the emerging artistic scene. His circle of friends and associates in London included the artists Robert MacBryde, Robert Colquhoun, Prunella Clough, Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan and John Minton.
During this time, Creme continued to paint figuratively, working to some degree under the influences of Adler and Picasso. As is often the case with an emerging original talent, he became impatient with working in this vein, and, as Adler was known not to paint landscapes, Creme undertook to work in that genre in a conscious effort to refine and develop his own language and style. He became a highly accomplished landscape painter. From the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, Creme regularly exhibited his work in group shows at The London Group, the A.I.A. Gallery, and at commercial galleries including the Redfern Gallery, the Leger Gallery, Gimpel Fils, and Roland, Browse and Delbanco.
In 1950, Creme visited the south of France for the first time and, perhaps not entirely unlike northern European painters before him, was moved and inspired by “the light, the color and the abstract shapes which came out of that landscape.” The new surroundings prompted a significant modification to his palette. In contrast to the more muted earth tones he employed in his earlier work in England and Scotland, Creme developed his approach to using warm, luminous colors. This new achievement began to round out and solidify his ability as a distinctive and highly subtle colorist. While still essentially representational, his work began to demonstrate a greater degree of abstraction. Stylistically, all traces of the influences of his forbears had effectively been subsumed, and his work was now completely his own.
In 1952, an exhibition devoted entirely to Creme’s work was staged at the Gallery Apollinaire in London. He was invited to show at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, USA. Martha Jackson had just opened her gallery in New York and bought one of Creme’s paintings which she exhibited in her gallery window. During this time, Creme continued his work in landscape, his art increasingly featuring more stylized and abstract figures, establishing a trend which would continue through the decade.
In 1963, Creme created the designs for a film production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, directed by Douglas Campbell and John Barnes. It was also at this time that a stylistic development began to take shape in his painting, a development that would determine the direction his art took from that point on.
The continual movement toward greater and greater abstraction seen in his work since the late 1940s now found expression in the art which would characterize Creme’s output from 1963/64 on. An entirely new kind of spiritual art, completely abstract and symbolic in nature, came about in large part due to Creme’s increasingly close contact with his spiritual Master. (This contact started in 1959, and became more and more intensive over the years following.) As a result, the years 1964 to 1969 were a particularly productive period for this new spiritual art. From the 1970s Creme’s work as an author and lecturer began to take up more of his time, although he continued to produce striking, original pieces in the spiritual vein.
In 1975 he held a one-man show at the New Dartington Gallery, Devon, and in 1979 showed paintings at The Art of the Invisible exhibition at the ICA gallery in London. In 1985, a number of earlier works were purchased by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum. This was followed by purchases of Creme’s work by the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow.
In his remaining decades, Creme continued to divide his time between his artwork and the demands of international lecturing on spiritual matters, editing and publishing. In 1974 he introduced an entirely new meditation, Transmission Meditation, which has been taken up worldwide. In 1979 Creme published his first book, The Reappearance of the Christ and the Masters of Wisdom, and went on to write 15 more related titles, which have been translated into many languages.
Benjamin Creme remained based in London with his wife Phyllis until his passing on October 24, 2016.
