Remarking on the textural drama of Matt’s paintings, a reader asks whether he considers surface the most important element in his conception of painting.

Matt responds:

Surface is acceptance of a reality, which is the world that either the abstract or semi-abstract or figurative spirits live in.

I don’t discriminate against surface.

I believe subconsciously that my idea of surface comes from flying across the world in airplanes.  I spend hours looking out airplane windows, and I see snow, deserts, villages, light, patterns, and mountains.

My surfaces are a syntheses of a collective of what I think of as this planet.  It isn’t a one-surface-fits-all approach.

The surface is part of my “Dip” process.  I can somewhat control that process.  For example, last year, after I finished two weeks of intensive dipping, I purposefully changed and tweaked every dip that I did.  The tweaking then magnifies itself within the surface.  It could be very minimal, almost like water lying on tin, or it could be very rugged like concrete and gesso and chunks of color lying on a piece of burlap.

All of those outcomes are acceptable, depending on what the world of the figures and spirits is going to be.  The process becomes about acceptance, about brother and sister and family, and they give and take to and from each other until they’re at a point where I instantaneously know this is or isn’t a great meditation.

These are instantaneous reactions that come from 20-odd years of knowing the strengths and weaknesses and idiosyncracies of the materials and how they’re going to react within certain frameworks.

When they’re left to mature over a period of months or years, they turn into a semi-predictable surface.  To really and truly see what’s going on in this whole other world inside, you need a jeweler’s glass.

So surface is very imporant, but is it the most important?  That would be like saying, “Is the outer body of an automobile the most important part of your transportation?  It is the outward manifestation of the whole, which also includes all the other aspects:  the flow of color, the pooling, the revealing of the spirits, and many of the other physicalities of the materials and how they accept and reject, how they mutate or stay the same...

The reality is, the engine’s going to go nowhere without the car, and the car is going nowhere without the engine!

Thanks for the question,
Matt