STUART Semple, Bournemouth-born enfant terrible of British Art, can’t let a day go by without working because a part of him fears it might just be his last.
“Well, yes, it’s that stark,” he says.
“I had a really bad allergic reaction to something I ate and nearly died. They identified 52 different things I was allergic to, including the rare peanut allergy that can kill you, so for quite a long time afterwards I found it really difficult to eat anything, even drink water.”
That was eight years ago now, but Stuart says his brush with death gave him the impetus to concentrate on his art.
“I don’t know that it informed the content so much as kicked me up the backside. It was such a change, as I felt indestructible as a kid – but then I started thinking if today could be my last day I might as well have a good one and make something.
“It still affects me to an extent. I usually excuse myself from the artist’s dinner after an exhibition launch. And at one of my show openings, someone had put bowls of peanuts all round the gallery. Luckily, my sister gathered them up. If someone had eaten a nut and then kissed me or something, well, it could have been fatal.”
Stuart, 27, opens his first solo international show in Milan on Thursday. Stuart Semple: Pop Disciple will run until May 8 and features new drawings, paintings and prints in the most complete show of his work to date.
He’s scared of flying, but will take the plane to Italy anyway. That might just provide a clue as to the air of anxiety, alienation, even fear, that pervades his ultra-modern pop-art – even at their brightest.
His latest work, for example, Alone Among Friends, features a painting of doomed Joy Division singer Ian Curtis.
“I think a lot of my pictures are melancholy and lonely. Although I liked the music, I didn’t really know much about Ian Curtis until I saw that film Control recently, and found it very emotional.
“I think there’s a sense that we cling to all these bright, shiny things around us that are meant to make us feel better, and yet they don’t really do it for us.
“Look, I don’t know my next-door neighbour. The things that connect us are increasingly remote.
“In the war, if you ran out of food, your neighbour would help. Nowadays people are happy to sit at work and quote catchphrases from some sitcom at one another, but not ask how they’re doing, how their parents are.
“It’s like what we have in common with one another is that Britney’s going mad, rather than anything more real. That’s where the sadness lies.”
For all his success – he has sold more than £2 million worth of work in the past two years to the likes of Debbie Harry, Johnny Depp, Boy George and Sienna Miller – he still feels very connected to his home town.
As a baby, his family lived in Holdenhurst Road, then moved to Kinson, Iford and Charminster – he went to St Peter’s School and studied advanced art and design at Poole.
“We didn’t always have very much, and sometimes we were short of food, but it was a very loving and full childhood.
“I still get down there as often as I can – I had a lovely weekend in the New Forest recently – and I still plan to open a studio there when I find the right place.”
After coming out of hospital, Stuart hit a creative high, adopting the name Nancyboy and producing some 3,000 artworks in three years.
He put on shows at Café Blu, the Russell-Cotes Museum and, notoriously, Borders.
“There’s nowhere really in Bournemouth to show your work, so I got together with the band Art Goblins – they’re called Art Brut now, and are doing very well – who were quite noisy and did this show in Borders. We got into a bit of trouble for that.
“But I recently made my first music video with Nicky, who was in the Goblins. He’s now in The Subliminal Girls and I did the promo video for Hungry Like the Wolf, which made the top 20 – it was very exciting.”
I wonder if film is an area Stuart could explore in the future. “Well, I’ve often thought my pictures should move, so maybe yes. I didn’t get paid for the promo video, and I couldn’t work with a band I didn’t love, but I can’t say I’d never do it again – only that I wouldn’t want to do it for the money.”
Time was when deciding to become an artist meant resigning yourself to a lifetime of odd jobs and penury. Then the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin hit paydirt, and suddenly it was a career option.
“Yes, my parents thought I’d have to chop an ear off or something to survive!” laughs Stuart.
“What I’ve noticed lately is more and more people coming into the art world for fame or money. It’s not about that. I make pictures because I have to…too much in art is determined by how much was paid for something, or who bought it. But I do it because I have to.”
Fact file
1980: Born in Bournemouth
1997: Poole School of Art and Design
2000: Debuts as Nancyboy
2001: The Return of Nancyboy, Borders, Bournemouth
• First published in Bournemouth Echo.