Honourable Mention

Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize 2024

Awarded by Modern Eden Gallery

Stuart Pearson Wright

Title:

“Middlesbrough”

Medium & Dimensions:

Oil on linen, 42 x 30 cm

About the Artist

Stuart Pearson Wright emerged from a council estate in the mid-1980s with a broken skull: an awkward and undiagnosed autistic boy, enmeshed in a profound existential crisis because he didn’t know his Father’s identity. His father had last been seen leaving half of him in a pot on a shelf in a South London hospital in 1975. Stuart was terrible at football but loved Spaghetti Bolognese and could draw things. He dusted himself down and with his vague intuitions and burning ambitions, found his way into art school. From there, Stuart staggered into the artworld like a blind man playing Monopoly without a copy of the rules, and he thrashed around, upsetting the Duke of Edinburgh, drawing people here, and painting things there. I once met former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in J.K.Rowling’s kitchen whilst she was making him a salmon sandwich. The salmon was, perhaps surprisingly, from a can. Eventually he found a kind of career.

Today Stuart lives in the ruins of a medieval castle in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in England, and have sheep and chickens and whippets as well as children of his own. He paint, draw, make etchings and sculpt, and he sometimes make little films. he found his father eventually, and they went to Amsterdam together and admired Vermeers. He is a very agreeable fellow, and now we’ve both moved on from the business of him leaving half of Stuart on a shelf.

“Middlesbrough”: Stuart met this family whilst travelling around Northern England in the former industrial city of Middlesbrough. It was a foreboding place with a sense that the world had given up on it and gone away. The people were solemn and angry or else anemic and devoid of hope. Some boys threw stones at me and a man opened the door of the telephone box I was in and shouted at me to “leave this place”. Stuart was young and confused but wanted to respond to his experience.