Stepping into Stuart Semple’s world is like entering a Willy Wonka-esque fantasyland. Only instead of chocolate and candy, everywhere you look there are bags of bright powdered paint pigments, color-mixing machines, paint-spattered canvases, sculptures, brushes and of course, brightly colored bottles of paint. The man himself bustles around with a giddy sort of energy, clad in furry animal slippers, with long hair and perpetually paint-stained fingers, a visual reminder of his love affair with color.
“I would explain color as something that can change our emotions and our state and way of being as we interact with that. And it is a way, really, of feeling the world inside us visually.”
To see him, you’d never think Semple is anything other than a creative type. You certainly wouldn’t peg him as a political crusader. But when someone threatens what he sees as a universal right to artistic self-expression, a different picture emerges…. read more >
