Chasing Ambition: The Spoils of Saint Hubris by Sterling Hundley

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The Spoils of Saint Hubris is an exhibition by the American illustrator, painter and graphic artist Sterling Clinton Hundley, which invites the viewer to reflect on the diversity of human ambitions. Metaphorical plots, symbolism and layering are a new element of an artist who abandoned a successful career in order to devote himself to pure art.

A few years ago, Sterling Hundley pulled himself together, spoke with knowledgeable people, secured recommendations, and took his portfolio of student work to no less than legendary art director of Rolling Stone magazine, Fred Woodward. A few months later, Hundley's first work - an illustration with Kurt Cobain - appeared on the pages of a magazine with a circulation of about one and a half million copies. Good start. Without slowing down, he continued to do illustrations for GQ, The New Yorker, Vibe and many other publications.

He became so successful that he retired from the profession. He published a book and left commercial orders, determined to make art and teaching the meaning of his new life.

Hundley copes with this task brilliantly. He now works for the Department of Communication Design at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) and is also involved in a distance learning program run by the renowned Kansas City Academy of Illustration. His Kickstarter project to raise funds for a one-man show made twice as much money as Hundley originally hoped to get. He has already managed to sell part of the exposition to a Russian collector (having gained invaluable experience in organizing the delivery of paintings to Russia). “I start my career all over again, and it's scary,” says the artist. "Every take-off in my life is accompanied by an unchanging fear of falling."

Hundley's first exhibition, The Spoils of Saint Hubris, is a collection of painting, graphics and sculpture, united by the theme of the hunt. In addition to quite literal images of foxes, hounds, horses and hunting paraphernalia, the plot of the hunt in the artist's works also has a metaphorical meaning. The congregation narrative evolves around the idea of pride and vanity, the motives that drive our race to constantly strive forward, to overcome and subjugate.

“This may sound like complete nonsense,” Hundley explains almost guiltily, “but the point is human ambition. And what happens when they encounter the natural world. All the geometry in the paintings is ambition and control."

Nonsense or not, but it is clear that Sterling Hundley is a thinking artist. He is interested not only in the formal aspect of the work, but also in the opportunity to put a deeper meaning into the work. It is both a return to the narrative nature of illustration, and the reason Hundley left it because he needed to tell his own story.

Fans of figurative, but filled with symbolism, painting will also like the work of the Romanian artist Dan Voinea.