Stuart Pearson Wright

Now living and working in East London, Stuart Pearson Wright grew up in the South of England, in Eastbourne, by the sea. He attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London and in 1998 won a travel grant from the National Portrait Gallery as part of the BP Portrait Awards. Wright used the cash to set off on a country wide tour, in a van, to paint and sketch. The resulting exhibition was called From Eastbourne to Edinburgh: A Painter’s Odyssey.

The work produced on tour drew comparison to Blake and Hogarth. Not for similarity of line, but in that the paintings so uniquely capture the British spirit. It’s certainly what I like of his work, discovered (frankly) today, some 12 years after that BP Portrait Awards. I came to his painting through It’s Nice That, and am particularly pleased. While his more recent works don’t exhibit the same interest in direct study of British life as his earlier painting, it still invokes the same subtly dark humor.

Learn more about Stuart Pearson Wright here. View a few more of my personal selections after the jump. The above is “Woman Surprised by a Werewolf” (2008).