"Artist Statement"

I love animals and I can paint well. I thought why not put those two things together and custom offer pet portraits.

I'm an all-around artist. I show abstract paintings (represented by Butters Gallery in Portland OR), am a guest artist with Blik, and work as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator.

As I write this, it has been less than a year since I've started this pet portraiture venture. I've averaged about a painting every two weeks. I've learned a lot from the experience. It has been great to sharpen my rendering skills back up and it has been wonderful to make work that can strike such a deep chord in people. One of the very last pieces I did was of Fancy, who died too young. Fancy's owner said it gave her chills when she saw it. Abstraction just touches people differently than that.

I don't know exactly -- it has been a real period of divergence in my artistic trajectory. On one hand, I have been doing these pet portraits which are the antithesis of "high art" (and consciously so: I hate contemporary art's snotty intellectualism -- its dismissal of any non-ironic emotion as 'sentimental.') while on the other hand, I've been working with Blik selling installation art -- where it feels like the high concept of the art has engulfed it entirely (a long story so drenched in post-modern terminology that I won't even dip into it parenthetically). At the same time, in my abstract work I've been on one particular 'subject' for about six years and feels like it is at a point of completion. What comes next is super-unknown.

Anyhow, one last thing about the pet portraiture is that it comes from such a place of love. I wanted to mention that: the love. I got here because I love animals. Paintings of them celebrate the bonds that we have with these furry animals that live in our houses; who we take care of, who'se importance to us so often surpasses our attachments to other material things. It is a wonderful thing. People seem to most often give my pet portraits as gifts. Someone they love loves some animal. So it is all part of a big cycle of kindness -- and I like that a lot.

Okay, this has been a kind of off-the-cuff 'artist statement.' If you have any questions or comments, feel free to get in touch with me.

Thanks,
Matthew
9.10.05