Andy Cropper: "Why I paint empty Sheffield streets at night which to me are still full of life"

Since 2009, his practice has explored the city’s streets, buildings and margins. In 2015 his focus became firmly rooted in the hours between twilight and deep night and feature everything from bus stops to alleyways and even and NCP car park.

"I became fascinated with the city’s familiar streets that are normally buzzing with people and what happened once the people have left and the streets are empty," says Cropper.

"They are the streets near my home on the south side of Sheffield but could really be any urban environment. They are not the prettiest streets ”

Cropper says he particularly became fascinated by light in those twilight and nocturne hours and how to reproduce them in his paintings.

"I read a book ‘The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows' by John Koenig, who talks about kenopsia - ‘the eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that’s usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet’ and that really sums up what I am about.”

At first glance his work has a photographic quality, but as you look deeper the ‘imperfections’ and brush strokes become evident.

"I do have a realist approach but it resists photographic exactness, instead reconstructing fleeting moments into textured, resonant images," he says. “When you look at one of my paintings you can clearly see my hand is in there. The more you look at it the more you can actually see. There has been a trend towards photorealism in recent years where the trend has been to make everything very smooth so that it looks like a photograph –that isn’t what I do.

“I'm not aiming to glamourise the mundane, but searching to find interest in the things around us that we usually ignore. There are fascinating things, often unobserved around each of us. I'm interested in those things that we miss, that we tend to use 'entertainment' to distract us from. I'm fascinated by the world around me not in an engaging way, but as an observer. I love watching the world go by. I am a voyeur.

"I am also interested in hauntology – that the landscape we're in holds visions and ghosts of lost and forgotten potential futures, that we live in the remains of what could've been, but never manifested.”

Born in Bristol in the early 1970s and raised in Blackpool, Cropper initially embarked on a Maths Degree at Bangor University before he dropping gout and returning home.

"I’d always been artistic and after I went back home I visited my old secondary school and spoke with my old art teacher who had always been very supportive. He told me to bring in the drawings I had been doing while I had been at university. After a few days he said I had been accepted onto an art foundation course.” He studied painting at Sheffield Hallam University in the 1990s and has remained in the city ever since.

Cropper didn’t finish that course either but it gave him the confidence to pursue a career in art.

He started out doing illustration and to make ends meet he got a job at Waterstones where he started to read more about his craft, became increasingly fascinated by light and discovered the work of Koenig.

“It was around 2015 that I really became to realise that my focus was on light.”

He did some work in the Winter Gardens trying to get commissions for portraits when he was approached by the manager and asked if he could do some some paintings of the Moor, which he did in his own way.

When not in his home studio he can be found walking the streets of Sheffield at dusk taking photographs on his iPhone.

"I used to have a proper camera but I think people found that quite suspicious,” he says. “I use my camera as a sketchbook, to test, record and then expand on what I see.

"Some of the photos I take, if enlarged, would become seriously uninteresting but by the action of painting, having made an image out of many marks, it gains a vibrancy, a texture, which is substantially different to a photograph even if the initial impression of my work is photographic.”

Cropper works in both acrylic and oils, gradually building up layers to get the effect he desires.

"I do the first layer in acrylic using a paint brush and then the last three layers are in oil and that’s where the light comes through. The layering process I use creates masses and clumps with very obviously painted areas. As I work on a painting, areas can shift quite drastically. This shift gives my paintings a certain vibration.

He says many of his paintings are reminiscent of Covid times when normally busy streets were suddenly eerily empty. He has always been supported by the Cupola Gallery, he says, and he also sells work on line with people buying his work from as far afield as Portugal and New Zealand.

His work is held in the permanent collection of Museums Sheffield at Weston Park Museum

And he will feature in the third heat of Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year 2026, airing January to February 2026.

Andy Cropper’s paintings will be on display at Cupola Contemporary Art Gallery, 178-178a Middlewood Road Sheffield S6 1TD until November 11. www.cupolagallery.com

To see more of Andy’s work visit www.andycropper.art