Back in July, I mentioned Stuart Pearson Wright‘s painting “Woman Surprised By A Werewolf”, and I wanted to remind everyone that you can now see it for yourself at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, England.
“Woman Surprised By A Werewolf” has been shortlisted for the John Moores 25 Contemporary Painting Prize, which runs from September 20th to Janaury 4th. From Wright’s feature page on the Liverpool Museums site, here’s the Artist’s Statement:
In 2007 I fell in love with a waitress from Aberystwyth. I rented a small cottage there and we explored the surrounding verdant landscape together. The chance discovery of small lambs, which had been slaughtered by birds of prey in implausibly bucolic settings, brought to mind the John Landis film, ‘An American Werewolf in London.’ This had scarred my subconscious and stimulated my imagination as a child. I began to consider the indifferent and potentially destructive forces at work in the natural world.
At this time I was experiencing something of a sexual epiphany, coming to terms with my own identity as a sexual animal (the natural world as manifest in my own urges). The symbiosis of wolf and man in the figure of the werewolf came to represent these ideas.
I found myself drawn to the lowbrow associations of the werewolf film sub-genre and was interested to explore that uncharted place where the mystery and sublime of the romantic landscape meets the high camp and melodrama of Hammer horror. ‘Woman Surprised by a Werewolf’ is the first canvas in a proposed four-part narrative.