Cult Leader: Charlie Hood

This season, as part of our Cult Leader series, we’ve been hanging out with some of London’s most daring and ambitious creatives who aren’t afraid to do things differently. Today we meet Charlie Hood, founder of Beach London gallery and agency and self-proclaimed computer game nerd. I’m Charlie Hood, I’m 30, I’m originally from Essex but live in London and I run the gallery here at Beach London based in Cheshire Street off Brick Lane. Our location here in Shoreditch is a good spot to have a gallery because you get really interesting people coming to visit. Beach is a fun place to work and anything can happen on your average day! We’re always putting on new shows and we work with all kinds of commercial artists and we also run an agency here so we’ll be putting on events and doing fun stuff for other brands too. At the moment I’m working on a new pin show, Pin-O-Rama. We’ve got pin submissions from loads of rad people like Goodhood, Heresy, Catalogue Library and Lazy Oaf too. We chose pins as we thought it’d be fun to have all these teeny tiny artworks on the wall. The exhibition launches on 2nd April; it’s all about first Thursday’s! For the gallery we like featuring really bright, colourful work and stuff inspired by skate graphics, punk and DIY culture. Old skate artists like Mark Mckee and Sean Cliver are a big inspiration. Jacob Ovgren is a great one too, we’ve done a show with him and he does a lot of the artwork for Polar Skateboards. We like to keep our exhibitions fun and create more of an experience than your typical gallery format. For example, we did this exhibition last year called Artcade where we got six arcade machines into the gallery and then 6 artists made a work of art inspired by the golden age of video games. At the end of the show, the person with the highest score on each machine won the piece of art above it. I am pretty obsessed with old retro computer games. My favourite console of all time is the Sega Saturn; that, for me, is like the golden era of games. My favourite game of all time is Guardian Heroes. If I had to travel for 63 hours in a box from UK to Australia like a man did in the sixties, my 3 essentials would be a tin of macaroni cheese, a Boost bar and a Gameboy with Tetris and Mario Kart on it. I'm wearing my Lazy Oaf Today Shirt at the moment as it’s formal yet fun so it’s good for wearing for work. ------------------- Visit Beach London gallery at 20 Cheshire Street, London E2 6EH and visit their webstore here. Catch up with more from Charlie and the Beach London gallery by following them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can join Charlie in Beach this Saturday 21st March for their Rita's on the Beach Cocktail night with Charlotte Mei.