Stuart Pearson Wright is an artist living and working in East London. He grew up in Eastbourne, a seaside town in southern England.
Born in 1975 in Northampton, Stuart drew with enthusiasm from an early age and after flirting with the idea of becoming an actor, finally opted for art school. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where his work received an ambivalent response from the tutors.
Stuart was to make the headlines again in 2004 with the release of a portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh. The painting featured a bare-chested Prince with a bluebottle on one shoulder. The portrait, which had been commissioned by the Royal Society of Arts, was unexpectedly refused. The tabloid newspapers enthusiastically printed a number of the Duke’s characteristic responses to his own portrait.
In 2009 Stuart co-ran a project space on Vyner Street called Five Hundred Dollars. He curated a group drawing exhibition called Kunskog which featured the work of Gillian Wearing, Michael Landy, Paul Noble and Ged Quinn, amongst others.
"I was first introduced to Stuart’s work when he won the BP travel award in 1998 and used the award to take a camper van around the seedier coastal towns of the UK producing an extra-ordinary series of narrative works that he called tragi-comedies. Fittingly the National Portrait Gallery recently commissioned him to paint British film Director Mike Leigh with whom he shares an almost Hogarthian wit. He won the BP National Portrait Award in 2001 with his portrait of 6 Past Presidents of the Royal Academy."