Half Boy: Stuart Pearson Wright Moves From portraits To Probing His Own History
In 1975, Stuart Pearson Wright entered the world as a product of artificial insemination, his father’s identity kept anonymous for the entirety of his life even to this day. This fact would fuel Wright’s early, burgeoning interest in expressing himself through the arts and a later rise to prominence in portraiture. In interviews, he would say his penchant toward self-portraits was not only due to narcissism, but “also a form of catharsis to heal the vacuum at the center of my identity.” Lacking a father pushed Wright to examine the patriarchal archetypes and examples of masculinity found in pop culture and art history.
During the past few years, the influence of his mysterious origins took on a more literal bent as he began the body of work Halfboy. Wright likens the arrival of his 2018 show at Cambridge’s Heong Gallery as a “coming out” experience, “albeit from a naive heterosexual point of view.” The self-awareness there offers some insight into Wright’s probing character, which is bared most in this collection of paintings, scenes tethered to the artist’s memories. “I have certainly never hidden the nature of my conception by donor insemination and my tortured existential feelings in relation to it, but this was the first time that this subject had been a major focal point for a body of work,” Wright says. “To define oneself as a Halfboy was also a way of addressing, in a very public way, my feelings of failure, both as an individual and as an artist.”
These words, like “halfsister” and “stepdad,” were prohibited when Wright was a child, “inevitably linking them with feelings of shame and secrecy as though the ‘halfness’ of my familial relations was taboo,” he says. “It felt absurdly transgressive to use these words in the context of the titles of paintings, but nonetheless very important for me to do, as though the truth of the matter had to be demonstrated.”
Wright came across a box of childhood photographs in recent years, placing him on a path in crafting new narrative work. The set was “a rare find as most such mementos were lost due to the peripatetic lifestyle imposed by familial circumstances in the 1980s,” as Heong Gallery notes in their description of the show. Halfboy’s debut has Wright taking part in several conversations about this intimate and deep-seated journey. When asked if it’s exhausting to keep talking about something so toiled, he offers this: “I think that being open and honest about personal stuff can be highly cathartic… Keeping secrets is a pain in the arse. My family is full of proverbial skeletons in closets. It makes for a stultifying and oppressive atmosphere. Perhaps to an extent it is a generational thing. My own generation is much more open than my parent’s generation I believe. For example, if donor insemination was a new idea today, there is no way that it would be done anonymously, except by renegade private clinicians. Doctors would be able to recognise how harmful it can be to keep these kind of processes hidden.”
I think that being open and honest about personal stuff can be highly cathartic… Keeping secrets is a pain in the arse…”
To define oneself as a Halfboy was also a way of addressing, in a very public way, my feelings of failure, both as an individual and as an artist.”
There’s a theatrical element to the pieces in Halfboy. Wright shifts perspectives and props up his subjects as if they were on a stage, encased in the rooms and outdoor settings he associates with childhood. Works like “Halfboy and Halfsister” also mix in a variety of unexpected materials with the oils: sheep’s wool, zebra wood, wire, and more. “When you spend most of your life pushing paint around canvases with a brush it’s inevitable that one starts to think about other ways in which a surface or texture can be represented,” Wright says. “I love finely rendered descriptive brushwork but it’s always at its most delicious when juxtaposed with broad areas of paint that have been dripped, splashed, or sprayed.”
In this specific work, Wright wanted to show a 1980s television set. Instead of conveying the vintage “kind of fake wood veneer” around the set through paint, Wright put a real veneer onto the canvas and then varnished it. Halfsister’s cigarette has wool-laden smoke emitting from it. Wright notes that this part was a challenge.
“Nausea” has a similar experimentation, with its crossing vehicles and a young Halfboy in the backseat. The work uses oils, paper plastic, sand, flock, wax, and other media, all on linen. “There is a tree with hundreds of tiny ivy leaves stuck on which have been cut out of paper with a scalpel and painted in green watercolor,” he says. “Collage elements keeps the process of painting interesting for me. At some stage I want to try and find a way of introducing LED lights into paintings. It’s something I tried about fifteen years ago but the technology wasn’t very advanced in those days and it wasn’t very successful. Although my portrait of J.K. Rowling in the National Portrait Gallery collection is backlit with a light panel.”
That casually mentioned Rowling portrait is one of the painter’s most high-profile works, a painting he began researching in 2004. The work garnered international attention. In a profile in The Guardian titled “Enigma of arrival,” written upon the Rowling portrait’s completion in 2006, the artist spoke about his paternity being “something that I grapple with on a daily basis.” The article poses whether his creativity thrives in that big question of his life. The painting itself was wholly Wright in execution, a melancholic Rowling seated at a table, confined by set-style walls in a room that recalls where she wrote the first Harry Potter adventure. Three eggs on a plate as she writes represent her three children. It’s a meditation on her fame and her personal life. NPG notes that he is “influenced by eighteenth-century toy theatres and the boxes of Joseph Cornell.”
When asked how placing himself in these recaptured narratives differs to the countless self-portraits he’s created in the past, he says that those past efforts “have often been ironic or flippant in tone, particularly those I made for the 2010 Riflemaker exhibition, in which I painted myself as a cowboy.”
After all, self-portraiture is far different than this type of narrative painting. “This body of work meant reflecting on my childhood and painting myself as a boy,” Wright says. “In doing so, I was trying to understand where my profound sense of melancholy came from, so the paintings were probing, and whilst humour isn’t entirely absent the tone is far from ironic. It was an intuitive process but nonetheless an exhausting one and after four years of it, I felt it was a good time to move onto something else and move away from myself as a subject for a while.”
So what is he doing now? At the time of this interview, Halfboy was about to begin its tour to other venues across the U.K. and Wright hadn’t actually painted in months. Wright has his own children, and used the time after the debut of Halfboy to spend time with them. Then, the rest of the year is committed to a series of commissioned portraits, one being a group of “thirty or forty men in dinner jackets.” He adds, “I am painting a group portrait of the [Society of Dilettanti], following in the hallowed footsteps of Joshua Reynolds, though he is not my painter of choice: too much bombast. He is a painter for Brexit voters, I suspect. Beyond that, I am very excited to be working on a production for Snape Maltings. I am designing and co-directing a production of Monteverdi’s short opera Combattimento for the 2020 festival, which will involve seven-foot puppets in suits of armour: a dream job.” Wright will also begin paintings that take influence from choreographer Pina Bausch’s improvisatory processes, “working with dancers to create narrative paintings.”
Meanwhile, Halfboy continues to traverse the museum and gallery circuits. And although Wright has been forthcoming about the story behind the body of work, he doesn’t get to unpack those works with each viewer. “One of the problems with being an artist is the lack of direct communication with the public who see my work,” Wright says. “I have spoken to several people who have had quite intense responses to the work, however, and that has been gratifying. I didn’t make the work with an audience in mind but for purely selfish, self-therapeutic reasons but it’s great to know that it has affected people in a profound way. The worst response would be indifference.”*
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