Artist's Statement
“A very good friend, an artist I honor as a mentor, Robert Moore, made an interesting analogy about painting. He compared painting with another artist to the energy of two burning coals. If separated, they still produce heat and light; when placed together, their synergy creates a hotter, brighter, longer-lasting fire. I’m something of an adventurer when it comes to nature, and most of my painting trips are solo treks into the least-disturbed, most inspiring places out there. It recently occurred to me that I consider nature to be another coal, my easel to be another, each color on my palette to be another, and so on. Each of these coals is a perennial teacher, always offering something up to this committed learner. I keep learning about structure, illumination, shadow, reflection, and atmosphere in painting. These concepts have so many possible permutations for an artist. I have enough coals for a really hot fire. I can’t say what I like best about painting. Being outdoors, being overwhelmed by nature, being able to express that in paintings, sharing the excitement of the experience—these all count a great deal. It’s probably the constant learning about the things I love.”
Patrick Matthews, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2007
Biography
Getting
a really good picture of Patrick Matthews is as easy as looking at an
exhibition of his paintings. His choice of subjects suggests the strongest
appreciation of the outdoors, an unwavering love of country, and a unique
set of perspectives, in both senses of that term. His paintings contain
visually arresting evidence of a comprehensive aesthetic and technical
education. Matthews has applied those to a lifelong enjoyment seeing,
imagining, drawing and painting. His works vibrate with organized energy
expressed in color, texture, scale, and distinctive and pleasing idiosyncrasies
in rendering. His paintings are visual retellings of the artist’s
sublime experiences in nature and in the general flow of life. Matthews
has always had natural ability to render the visible world in single and
multiple vanishing point perspectives, depicting distance, height, depth,
and breadth, as the human eye sees them or with his own slight adjustments
for effect. He treats color with knowledge of the emotional evocation
potential in things like saturation, intensity and surface. Matthews has
many ways of amplifying what he sees and experiences on his painting trips,
all in service of taking the viewer to distant places, affording vicarious
visitation to rare and magic vistas in nature—wild, remote, uplifting
to experience in Matthews’s senses-awakening interpretations. He
sometimes gives the viewer aerial points of view, floating eye level between
ten and twenty feet above the ground. This can lend a surprising element
of vivid dreaming to the viewer’s experience.
Growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas, Matthews had natural interest and aptitude for drawing, and a supportive, encouraging response from parents, teachers, and peers. Of one thousand students in his graduating class, Matthews was voted Most Artistic. At the School of Architecture at the University of Arizona, Matthews excelled in delineating complex, inventive, post-modern designs. He won the award for Best Designer of his senior class. After earning his degree, Matthews toured Europe as an artist and architect, soaking up inspiration from the historic span and plenitude of artistic achievement in the cities and museums he visited. He returned to the U.S., fully charged with enthusiasm to begin his career. He spent the next fourteen years designing buildings for a variety of uses. He painted for his own enjoyment, and eventually resolved to make it his full-time occupation while designing a house for a professional painter, Barry Thomas. “Thomas taught me to paint,” says the grateful Matthews. His architecture clients started offering to buy his paintings from the walls of his offices. Wanting to spend more time outdoors, painting the experience, he amassed 48 originals for a gallery opening in Little Rock in the year 2000. After all 48 sold on opening night, he needed no further urging finish up in architecture and start painting full time. He has done so ever since, to the delight of institutional and individual collectors and in fulfillment of his need to explore the mountains, deserts, rivers, fields, swamps, times of day, seasons, their means and extremes, and to express it all uniquely, memorably, and durably in the rich vocabulary of painting.
After moving to Santa Fe in 2002, Matthews quickly found gallery representation and has been living his dream fully. He thrives on seasonal extremes, enjoys fishing and hunting, lives to paint the excitement he feels in nature. Matthews paints in every season. He has outfitted a four-wheeler, a truck, and a boat to get him into remote places and transport what he needs in order to paint when he gets there. He paints the wilderness in New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and his beloved Arkansas. His latest trip covered 2,000 miles over ten days at high altitudes in Colorado. He painted outdoors each day and took more than 1,000 photographs for later reference in the studio. Matthews finds larger formats particularly satisfying for their greater ability to bring outdoor scale indoors. A seven-foot painting of a cypress swamp hangs in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion.
Grateful for the opportunities America affords its citizens, Matthews has been patriotic all his life. On the night of September 11, 2001, he painted an American flag over a landscape he had just completed. His wife, Katherine, felt the power in this expression of pride and anguish. In tribute to the 343 NYFD firefighters who gave their lives in the pursuit of saving the lives of others, Matthews made 1,000 prints, sold most of them, and then gave the entire proceeds, the original painting, and 343 signed and numbered prints to Battalion 9 at 729 8th Avenue, the station which suffered the greatest loss of firefighter lives. Today his flag paintings represent celebration, hardship, overcoming hardship, and lifelong pride in the freedom and principles the flag represents.
Matthews is an artist with the highest standards of design and craftsmanship. He works in materials that will endure. He knows the joy of continuous learning. He does everything in life as if he’s going to sign it. Fortunately, much of what he does involves the making of great paintings.
Matthew's
works can be seen at Waxlander Gallery, 622 Canyon Road.
Hours: 9:30-5:30 daily. (505) 984-2202 or (800) 342-2202.