Inner Light Woman
Inner Light Man
Matthew Green has been drawing as long as he can remember. “My parents gave me a paint bucket and a large brush for my 5th birthday so I could paint the carport with water. That was the best gift ever,” he says. He established a reputation in first grade for doing all the artwork for class plays and took five art lessons from a retired art teacher when he was 10. Then he took a break from art for a little while.
“It took a long time to finally accept or admit to myself that I wanted to spend all of my time painting. Art was always way in the back of my mind but it was always there. When I was 22 I was in a restaurant in Arizona that had some great art on the walls. I was looking at a very large piece on his wall. It was a little girl reaching into a fishbowl. It was made with layers of oil pastels. It was so cool. Her hand holding the fishbowl was so tweaked. I wanted to just grab a crayon and fix it. Then I realized that a big part of what I liked about it was how ‘loose’ the lines were. That’s when I started painting again.”
Matt moved to New York three years later and studied fine art at SVA and solidified his identity as an artist. “I realized that I wanted to be that old guy, smoking, in my underwear, and surrounded by my work, like that famous photograph of Picasso,” he says.
Over this past year Matt has really stepped up production. “I’m at a point now where painting is all I think about and all I want to do,” he says. “Most recently I have been working on silhouettes filled with stars. I’ve been thinking a lot about time and space, eternity, how connected everything is in the universe. With these paintings I’m trying to connect the past, present, and future, and the entire universe, as one.”
“Before that I did a series of silhouettes looking like they were cut out of a brick wall. I like Brick America, which is a map of the USA cut out of a brick wall. When you first look at it you’re hit with the strength of the wall and our solid brick wall country but then as you stare at it you begin to think about how walls do eventually crumble.”
“Then there’s the Salvador Simpson series, which are oil on canvas. They are Daliesque, baron landscapes with people holding up giant cartoony mask/kites representing self-image or emotions. Then there’s the ‘multi-eyed’ series. These oil paintings show my cubist tendencies. The cubist’s showed objects in motion or objects from various angles. With these paintings I’m thinking more of painting someone’s range of emotions, again trying to connect us all.”
“When someone purchases my work I hope that they really want to take it home and stare at it for hours, like I do. I would hope that they find meaning in it, whether the meaning is mine or their own.” See Matthew’s artwork at his website and contact Matthew directly for more information about his work.
