East Coast Open Matt Wade – Judith and Holofernes

For obvious reasons, Scarborough Art Gallery has not held an East Coast Open since 2019. However, the current exhibition has attracted over one hundred artists. The works submitted include textiles, painting, prints, mixed media and photography. While this is not a competition, there will be a public vote to identify the most popular work. This is a profile of just one of the artists.

East Coast Open
Matt Wade – Judith and Holofernes

How do we extract beauty from the shocking?

Matt Wade’s controversial painting comes with a health warning. As you enter the room where it is hung, a sign warns that there is a painting in the room that may cause offence. But why? The painting depicts a well known, Old Testament, story, versions of which have featured in the catalogues of Old Masters such as Caravaggio and Donatello.

In graphic detail, representations of Judith and Holofernes have shown her in his tent, knife in hand as she decapitates him. The story goes on that she took the head back to her besieged city and used it to galvanise the struggle against the invading armies of Holofernes. However, the Bible story does not concern us here.

What Matt Wade has done is to take the story and the paintings of a previous era and repurposed the basic elements for today. It is a self-portrait showing a bare torsoed figure, pulling back his hair by the left hand while a blade in the right hovers over the neck. The intention is quite clear.

When I ask him, “Where is Judith?”, the motivation of presenting the story in this way comes as a surprise, For Matt, the images are a kind of atonement and a confession of guilt at being a man in a world that privileges masculinity.

It is superbly painted in acrylics and perhaps it is the realism that makes the work controversial. Matt Wade himself is the mildest mannered most softly spoken man you could ever want to meet. Unlike others I have featured in this series of profiles, he is not a professional artist, but owns his own graphic design business. He feels that relying on others to buy his work would not put bread on the table.

He is concerned to make it clear that Judith and Holofernes is not typical of his work. His preference is for figure drawing The torso of Holofernes is testament to years of practice drawing the human form.

Particular influences include the Austrian painters Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. The qualities that Matt admires are the use of colour and their commitment to their subjects. When asked about the painting at the East Coast Open that he liked, Wendy Tate’s Receding Tide is his immediate response – a picture that I admired too.

His advice for a novice painter is to learn to look at detail, paying particular attention to the play of light. He advises to fix an image in your memory before making a commitment on paper.

The question posed at the beginning of this profile is a difficult one to answer. We take pleasure in horror as long as it stays within the realms of the imagination. Sometimes, a work of art pushes that limit: just where does it lie? What Matt Wade’s piece does is to challenge those boundaries and we should thank an artist who takes those risks and, indeed, exhibition curators who do not take the easy option and put only the most anodyne works on the walls.

Matt Wade’s painting adds another dimension to a very impressive East Coast Open.