CLICK HERE TO VISIT STUARTSEMPLE.COM
And See Stuart Semple's latest work
Below are some recent articles on Stuart Semple.
“Drink Me,”
--Lewis Carroll
Let’s say Stuart Semple is embarking on a new painting. Picture this: he dives down his own personal rabbit hole and emerges—exhausted but triumphant—with a handful of inspiration and memory. His catch, so to speak, is then served up as a painterly pop culture cocktail for all to imbibe.
Of course, this is partly a fairytale. In reality Semple’s spectacular acrylic-and-mixed-media on canvas works require months of planning, a variety of techniques and, strictly due to the massive scale of the major pieces, several assistants.
Working from his belief that “pop culture is the most efficient language” for any meaningful communication, Semple creates proud artistic landscapes by culling from the legends of his own past as well as the flotsam and jetsam of our collective pop cultural seas. Overflowing with subject matter, they’re held together by the inherited anxiety of the generation into which he arrived.
Born in 1980, the worldly young artist unearths buried treasures from the decades at the end of the last century. The captured impressions come from mass media—Hollywood movies, tabloid news shows, the cultural elite and chart-topping bands. Semple’s paintings are dark and dreamy, nervy but questioning. They act as his own brand of existential time capsules. But if hell is other people, it's also true that reality is where you find it.
Stuart Semple’s life is an often glamourous and sometimes risky archeological dig.
“It’s not true I had nothing on, I had the radio on.”
--Marilyn Monroe.
Music and painting are inseparable for Semple. His hybrid creations are, in essence, songs made "just like tracks on an album." They're occasionally disjointed and always memorable. Most importantly, they sing themselves.
Marilyn Monroe, or someone like her, features in many Semple works. For the artist she’s a symbol of style, status and surface. A brand name to aspire to, just as the Chanel logo instantly signifies hope and aspiration as much as any symbol for currency or religious icon.
Now as the American notions of fashion, fame and femininity have become absorbed into the pop culture of the world, everyone can find depth in the superficial. But more than that, Monroe (the troubled siren) epitomizes the synchronicity of tragedy and beauty that so engages Semple. She was inventing and destroying herself long before there were coke-fueled discos or our beloved MTV. For the artist, Monroe is a ghostly idol whistling a pop song in an effort to mask her fear. Marilyn’s perfume of anxiety pervades his thoughts of her. Years after her death, he still breathes her in.
“Went over to the Criterion to see Breathless (tickets $10). It’s strange to see Richard Gere doing this. If it’d been somebody like Matt Dillon it would have been like a James Dean movie. It’s that Sartre way, the nothingness thing. You would think existentialism would be still modern, but it isn’t.
--from The Andy Warhol Diaries
Like the silver-wigged master from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania before him, Semple is a born colorist. His paintings boast the most spectacular hues and richest blacks. The artist has many of his acrylics specially mixed and names them: “Ray Gun Red, Dick Pink…and I forget what the green is called.” If you cut Stuart Semple, he might bleed a day-glo rainbow.
Since color so expertly plays its spectacular role in the pop transmissions Semple gives birth to, it’s easy to grasp the sharp surface of his paintings. However, the more time spent with each canvas we watch it become darker in subject. Like Uncle Andy's "Death & Disaster" series, where the candy-coating is seductive and tricky, Semple's friendly colors get more and more intense.
Warhol's greatest gift to future generations of artists was his nervy knack for appropriation. He made it cool to pilfer from pop culture's readymades. Newsworthy gossip, celebrity calamity, bits of songs and graphic design all find their way into Semple's work as well.
With a post-sexual, Warholian approach, Semple's theme is Fame in all its incarnations. But his process is something quite different. As we know, Mr. Warhol used silkscreens in part because they were fast and assistants could do it for him, and claimed that he liked making movies because "the camera has a motor. You can just turn it on and walk away." Semple (and his assistants) on the other hand, utilize a painstaking method of painting these new handmade mythologies. Notions of reproduction and mechanization in art, which Semple often sees as insidious, are turned on their swollen heads. As the artist puts it:
“The machine is at the start of my process, not at the end. The print function is disabled. Within the works there are expansive meticulously detailed hand-painted elements that mimic printing techniques from silk-screening to lithography. I reinstate the personality, the defect, the humanity. I’m painting print, not printing paint. Mechanization and fast printing reduced design to the level of the disposable. Images are churned fast, we are bombarded: millions per second. If print is temporal, paint is eternal.”
Significantly, once the path of a painting has been decided upon, Semple doesn’t allow himself to veer too far from it. Alterations are rare. Erasing? Never. “I prefer to work without that safety net,” Semple explains. Still, one couldn’t be blamed for wondering if the artist/poet/composer Semple feels that the act of erasing is too symbolic of death.
“This note should be pretty easy to understand”
--from Kurt Cobain’s suicide letter
At some point on his journey, Semple began adding text to the works. Bold characters act as anchors in almost every piece now. Though forceful, they add a dose of cryptic to each collage of images. Vaguely melancholic lyrics that have lingered in his head (“Scared to sleep alone,” “Can’t Handle Love,” “Thunder in Our Hearts,” “Slow Decay”) are rescued and given permanent, if shaky, new contexts. They’re liner notes in limbo.
Semple's "diaries" are not as private as most. In fact, it's as if his are being read over a loudspeaker. Just as the Pop singer finds something universally recognizable amid fleeting thoughts, Semple’s autobiographical canvases say, “I was here” for all of us.
“It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.”
--Marcel Proust
Semple’s subjects are selected from among those who have influenced him—often by dint of a famous demise. In addition to Kurt Cobain and Marilyn Monroe, the artist has depicted dead child-beauty-queen JonBenet Ramsey and that ultimate sacrifice on the altar of Fame, Edie Sedgwick. Like Proust chronicling a remembered life from his sickbed, Semple wants us to commit to memory his fallen stars.
Whether oversized or compact, scale is one way in which Semple makes his works unforgettable. The artist requires that his visions loom as large for us as they do for him. The newer room-sized panels are startling. Other works, only the size of an LP record jacket, draw you in close to study their layered and sincere components.
If life is the path of gravity that pulls us from the womb and into the grave, Semple’s paintings can be thought of as signposts. Popular pop-ups for the population, if you will. They inform and conceal, as do most things in the world. Stuart Semple’s wild ride is right there for all of us to see. Like a rare album with a most compelling sleeve.
-Doug McClemont
CLICK HERE TO VISIT STUARTSEMPLE.COM
"We are the anxiety generation," affirmed Stuart as he leant back into his black leather couch, his voice tempered with melancholy. His most recent work, a huge diptych entitled "Monster" looms to our left, its cast of angular models and disembodied blood red lips are intimidating at such dramatic scale. "We saw the world change; TV changed, advertising changed, music video came of age.... MTV was born, I saw Madonna happen, the Spielberg movies... It was pumped into our heads that we could do anything, with that inspirational 80s synth sound seemly in every song...but then there were the strikes, Thatcher, we saw that the popstars were just part of a dream and now they probably work in a Texaco garage; it wasn't real"
At only 25 artist Stuart Semple has achieved an astonishing degree of success, both critically and commercially, but despite his achievements he still remains an enigmatic figure on the fringes of the established art world. As I spoke with him in his frenetic East London studio I witnessed at first hand just why the nervous young man in front of me is a phenomenon. "Look at my tongue" he exclaimed excitedly, "There are bare patches and bits all round the edge; that's called geographic tongue, which is an external image of my inner tension, I'm not absorbing vitamins properly, it's showing in my tongue...and it hurts."
We met in the early evening, as the studio lay dormant and sat chatting amidst the surreal detritus of a day of industry. A wooden heart, in a crude splintered state is propped behind Stuart's head, fresh canvases lean against the walls, a pile of gloss covered flowers, bookcases crammed with esoteric texts, a lizard house (complete with lizard), two very cluttered desks circled by reams of complicated flowcharts and lists and the leftovers from some kind of tea party, overseen by a stuffed pheasant's plastic eyes fixed vacantly ahead. It was an intriguing chaos.
"My old studio was isolated, industrial, bleak, nobody would come there unless they absolutely had to. You could see your breath in the winter; it was just me 9am to 5pm, painting. When I first moved here it was kind of really sparse and I had the dream of an artists factory...There was some residue in my head maybe about what Jeff Koons was up to or what Warhol had done and you know it is that kind of weird aspiration thing, where you want your art "factory" but the reality of it, well it wasn't really like that. It actually started to become it's own thing, it isn't like a Koons thing or a Warhol thing and it isn't like a business premises, neither is it simply an art studio..." He giggles at his own lack of clarity then passes me a photograph; Semple is pictured lounging in a chair surrounded by a number of individuals, mostly young and some rather eccentric in appearance, the Warhol comparison is inevitable.
"My practice before now used to be so insular and I kept meeting all these talented people when I ventured into the wider world, I wanted to find out more about them, they were so intriguing...Then when I thought about the other things that I wanted to do, the off canvas projects that interested me, it seemed perfect, to involve the other creatives I've met. We could then tackle film, fashion, IPTV...Everyone in the photo has done specific things; they have all been in the studio and worked really hard...Prop makers, illustrators, make-up artists, film editors...I have found that a creative impulse can't end at the edge of the canvas, if you're a creative individual who needs to keep on making, then it comes out in loads of other ways as well, you just can't help it and the people that come to my new space have facilitated that"
Stuart's creative impulses have generated several new endeavours, including an online TV portal and a clothing brand; Stuart Semple Industries has grown into a formidable artistic and commercial enterprise that expands into many disciplines. Many of the strange artefacts that grace the studio floor relate to the fashion project, elaborate sets are being built for the look book models to be photographed against. I asked him why he felt that he, as a painter, should be spending his time working on a garment "I think it is part of me wanting to be part of the real world again, because painting is so divorced from real life that actually these projects are kind of out there aren't they? It's just out, it's like another frontier but it's still art, it's still my work even if it's clothing." The garment isn't just about the wearer looking decorative either, as an extension of his work the piece is inevitably ideologically loaded; entitled "Rebels and Devils" the line is a controversial homage to a pantheon of cultural icons that intrigue and inspire Semple.
The tragic Warhol muse Edie Sedgewick, the occultist Aleister Crowley and the enigmatic Syd Barrett are amongst those featured on the unusually shaped hooded top. "Edie is really interesting, she was Andy's muse I guess, for only about a period of a year, hers is a very sad story, she could have achieved so much more but she was destined to die...The archetypal doomed starlet" Edie's is just one of several beautiful faces that are strikingly rendered in Stuart's work, on and off the canvas; his new collection titled "A tiny slice of my state of mind" (that he half jokingly refers to as his greatest hits) is littered with many ominously flawless visages grabbed from fashion shoots and advertising. This facet of his work has led to the some interesting and unexpected opportunities; Stuart is currently preparing to show at two forthcoming biennials, one in Sao Paulo and another in Liverpool; the two shows have made him reconsider various aspects of his work "It never really dawned on me that my work was portraiture until I was asked to be included in Liverpool...it felt kinda weird that my work would be sitting next to the work of other people I admired as great painters, it is more frightening than anything, as I have never really viewed my work in that context. Sao Paulo is the furthest away I have ever exhibited and I have absolutely no clue what the culture over there is like and for somebody who is obsessed with popular culture and critiquing it that is a bit of an unknown. Ultimately it is interesting, as the brief for the work I am making is "No direction home" and that is how I am feeling at the moment...I know where I am, but I don't really know what my place of safety will feel like until I get there. Where home is".
This pervading sense of uncertainty, or as Stuart calls it, impending sense of doom, is something that persists as a theme of the work and an aspect of Stuart's composure. One gets the impression that he is constantly assessing the risk that his environment and even his own body present to him; that he is a man at odds with his reality. This is perhaps understandable when you consider the tremendous rate of his success and the difficulties presented by his frequent health problems. It must be bizarre to be so young and have such demand and value attached to your creative output; most of the artists that Stuart admires were well into their thirties before they had acquired the wealth and power that he currently enjoys " I guess it is scary because there are no rules; I don't feel like there is anybody out there who is in my situation, or that I can read about. I never set out to be successful in those terms...The whole idea was just to feel like an artist, but it quickly became apparent that these days, being a successful artist is bound up with a need to understand business and a knack for self promotion. Ultimately it feels quite lonely, because I want more than anything to sit down with somebody who feels like me and for me to relate to them, but at the end of the day I'm on my own."
So why is he compelled to create the art that causes him to exist in such isolation? "When I was a kid my nana made paintings with oil paint and I was always really inspired by the fact that she could make these pictures. One day she opened her draw to me and gave me a pallet knife and I started using her oil paint. She showed me books on impressionists and I'd copy the works of Van Gogh and people like that. When I was about nine or ten my mum took me to the National Gallery and we walked round and everything looked boring and grey, to a kid it wasn't really exciting...then at the end of one of the rooms there was The Sunflowers, the real thing. It has burnt into my head, I can still see it now...and I thought I want to do that, I want to be the person who makes that. That was it."
Dark reminiscences lie at the heart of the growing Semple myth; many of his fans are attracted to this instinct he possesses to dig through the flesh of temporal joy to expose the bare bones of a more sinister reality. Semple is the Poe of Pop. His lurid paintings are bright, as they speak in a vernacular that is the second language of his generation, the detritus of two decades of intensive, and intrusive media bombardment. To be uncovered is an emotional pallet of unrelenting fear, disappointment and false promise. His own fear, as well as that he observes in his peers is a constant source of material, in fact his phobia of a repeat of a life threatening allergy reaction in 1999 is the inspiration for of many of his works and the cause of an ongoing anxiety disorder. It was in the aftermath of that day that he gave himself to his art completely; tugging at his collar with agitation Semple recalls the events "Up until that day I was a normal kid, I went to art school, I was like everyone else...Then one evening I had a huge allergic reaction, my tongue swelled up so big I could hardly breathe and I found myself in a hospital bed, dying. I was terrified. My condition deteriorated rapidly...at one point I officially died, my vital signs zeroed completely. I remember thinking whilst I remained conscious that should I survive I will really become an artist and I made a promise to myself, it sounds cheesy, but I did, to myself...and to divinity, that I would...because until then art was just something I did... but then I realised that art was the one thing I felt it was worth living for. I have my ECG, the printout which shows the "flatline" the point at which I died; that's my own artwork, just for me, it is too tender to ever share."
It sounds just like a movie, which is ironic since his own success story is not unlike one of the gleaming but ultimately hollow pop fairytales his work critiques. Semple however, does not get to leave the set of his Artstar fantasy at night, all the insecurity, confusion and pressure of his youthful success follows him to his very real bed.
Despite the obvious fragility of it's creative driving force it is clear that something very exciting is happening in Semple's studio; the scope and vision of his work is commanding considerable attention, his collaborate pieces are drawing upon the skills of many new and intriguing young creatives. It is all too easy to be reminded of the Warholian Factory, but could the anxious Semple withstand the circus of intrigue such comparisons would inenvitably attract? Probably not. "I would rather be on my own in the middle of nowhere painting my pictures, it is a quiet process, but I realised that to fulfil my ambition as an artist I cannot physically do it alone...Through my work I have analysed the cultural industries so the natural progression is to create a new autonomous one, whether doing that and retaining my ideology is possible or not I haven't proven yet, but it does feel increasingly awkward" This discomfort however seems to be as much a part of Semple as his constantly monitored, irritated tongue. I ask him if he will ever feel safe, even without the confusing context of his life as an artist "I'd like to think so but I think it is extremely unlikely because for me to feel safe a whole lot of things out there in the world and inside my body that I have no control over have to change. How can I feel safe when there are thousands of people involved in the machinery of a global situation that driven by human ego and blind desire...how could this ever stop?" In a moment of sound bite regurritation that reminds me of his paintings Stuart cites one of his favourite movies, Fight Club, and grins "On a long enough time line the survival rate for everyone drops to zero...the reality is I'm dying and the truth is I'm scared to death of that fact."
CLICK HERE TO VISIT STUARTSEMPLE.COM