To define oneself as a Halfboy was also a way of addressing, in a very public way, my feelings of failure, both as an individual and as an artist.”
There’s a theatrical element to the pieces in Halfboy. Wright shifts perspectives and props up his subjects as if they were on a stage, encased in the rooms and outdoor settings he associates with childhood. Works like “Halfboy and Halfsister” also mix in a variety of unexpected materials with the oils: sheep’s wool, zebra wood, wire, and more. “When you spend most of your life pushing paint around canvases with a brush it’s inevitable that one starts to think about other ways in which a surface or texture can be represented,” Wright says. “I love finely rendered descriptive brushwork but it’s always at its most delicious when juxtaposed with broad areas of paint that have been dripped, splashed, or sprayed.”
In this specific work, Wright wanted to show a 1980s television set. Instead of conveying the vintage “kind of fake wood veneer” around the set through paint, Wright put a real veneer onto the canvas and then varnished it. Halfsister’s cigarette has wool-laden smoke emitting from it. Wright notes that this part was a challenge.
“Nausea” has a similar experimentation, with its crossing vehicles and a young Halfboy in the backseat. The work uses oils, paper plastic, sand, flock, wax, and other media, all on linen. “There is a tree with hundreds of tiny ivy leaves stuck on which have been cut out of paper with a scalpel and painted in green watercolor,” he says. “Collage elements keeps the process of painting interesting for me. At some stage I want to try and find a way of introducing LED lights into paintings. It’s something I tried about fifteen years ago but the technology wasn’t very advanced in those days and it wasn’t very successful. Although my portrait of J.K. Rowling in the National Portrait Gallery collection is backlit with a light panel.”
That casually mentioned Rowling portrait is one of the painter’s most high-profile works, a painting he began researching in 2004. The work garnered international attention. In a profile in The Guardian titled “Enigma of arrival,” written upon the Rowling portrait’s completion in 2006, the artist spoke about his paternity being “something that I grapple with on a daily basis.” The article poses whether his creativity thrives in that big question of his life. The painting itself was wholly Wright in execution, a melancholic Rowling seated at a table, confined by set-style walls in a room that recalls where she wrote the first Harry Potter adventure. Three eggs on a plate as she writes represent her three children. It’s a meditation on her fame and her personal life. NPG notes that he is “influenced by eighteenth-century toy theatres and the boxes of Joseph Cornell.”
When asked how placing himself in these recaptured narratives differs to the countless self-portraits he’s created in the past, he says that those past efforts “have often been ironic or flippant in tone, particularly those I made for the 2010 Riflemaker exhibition, in which I painted myself as a cowboy.”
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