Donna Huddleston Takes the Stage at White Cube

Tucked away in her East London studio, Donna Huddleston was having a sap-green summer. Far from the abrasive hue plugged by British pop provocateur Charli xcx, Huddleston's is a true earthy green—one that has coloured Rousseau's jungles, Monet's lily pads, and Van Gogh's wheat fields.

This shade of Caran d'Ache colouring pencil was repeatedly sharpened into action throughout the sunnier months as Huddleston prepared for her biggest show to date: a solo presentation of all new drawings and paintings for her debut show Company at White Cube, Mason's Yard, in London (6–28 September 2024).

Huddleston has always favoured coloured pencil, drawing out her figurative worlds of cast and character with her delicate handling of airy, pastel hues. Now, for the first time, she turns to acrylic paint.

'My pencil drawings were getting more and more intensive with colour and as a result were taking longer to build up,' she tells me. We've met in a courtyard in St. James's. 'I was looking for scale and saturation, so painting was the next natural step—it's exciting.'

And she's stuck to her word—these paintings are tremendous in both size and splendour. The largest, Night Vision, is a hefty canvas featuring a medieval-styled female figure and measures four-and-a-half metres wide. While the smallest, the two-metre-high Gentleman Caller, is a commandeering full-length portrait of a voguish, androgynous suited figure donning a cowboy hat, pink cravat, and sap-green heeled boots.

Her five drawings are equally ambitious. All around the one-metre mark, each has been arduously worked with two or three layers of soft colouring pencil. Huddleston likens their assembly to theatre sets, built up from the backdrop through to the proscenium that frames the stage.

This parallel is no coincidence: rather it stems from a background in theatre design. Born in Belfast, Huddleston grew up in Sydney, where she studied at the National School of Art and later at the National Institute of Dramatic Arts. Fox Studios had just opened in the city, and so Huddleston and her classmates fell into various jobs on big-budget films.

'I fell in love with the psychology of performance and the collaboration that theatre offers. Some nights it works, others it may not, but that's the beauty of it.'

It wasn't long before Huddleston wound up in London, where the freedom and solace of studio life was more attractive than the bright lights of Hollywood blockbusters. Despite this change, her love of theatre never faded, and she drafted the magic of performance and its protagonists into her nascent artistic practice.

'My studio is a trove of tear-outs and prints-outs of performers, actresses, and film stills,' she says. 'I never work directly from them. Rather, as I draw or paint, these characters become themselves.'

Huddleston's latest five-star review goes to Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke at London's Almeida Theatre, while the work of filmmakers Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Éric Rohmer—particularly their fidelity to their company of actors—has been honoured by Huddleston in this show by re-casting her 'company' in different roles throughout the exhibition.

American actor Gena Rowlands, blue-toned and in the nude, appears to have nabbed a leading role, standing over a young girl as a 'monument to motherhood'. The girl, whose demure face is framed by shag hair, is conservatively dressed in a jacquard sweater that buries the frills of her starched-collar shirt beneath.

Nearby, the green-suited figure from Gentleman Caller—referencing a character from Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie (1944)—reappears clad in red, sitting poised in a large-scale landscape painting Patagonia.

One drawing, Sweet Tea, might just be a cameo by Huddleston herself. She stares out at the viewer, smoking a cigarette with the steely defiance of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct or Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.

It's this love of collaboration—actors, directors, and designers working together, day in, day out—that begs the question: is there a yearning to return to theatre?

'I'd love to design an opera,' Huddleston says. 'But I'm good at working on my own—it's a great privilege.'

'I've been at my studio for 17 years, that's longer than I've lived anywhere in London. It's always been a constant and that's what I treasure most today.' —[O]