Matt Coombs
I am a landscape painter infused with chemicals. I create paintings and drawings that depict a fluidity between the figure, the synthetic, and the natural environment. I am interested in emotional adaptability, and my own willingness to seek the sublime in an augmented “nature”. I often build my paintings in thin glazes of oil color, attempting to capture light and temperature as dutifully as earlier masters of American landscape painting. However, as I am focused on creating convincing naturalistic spaces, I am also focused on negating these illusionistic elements with line, color, and imagery that reveal the contrivance of the diegetic space. In several of my paintings I conceal parts of the painted surface with tarpaulin. As polyvalent as a tarp can be in a landscape, one use of particular note is for fencing of development and construction. The diaphanous border between myself and “nature” is brought into sharp relief when confronted with such a membrane. I also make drawings which at first glance appear to be sincere charcoal studies of tall grass or weeds, though these drawings are made with BBQ charcoal, fire starter wax, dog shampoo, and Miracle-Gro potting mix. The difference is often only understood by encountering the list of materials. This inability to perceive difference relates to my experience working as a landscaper, building a pond and two waterfalls in the garden of a residence. The birds who come to bathe in this water feature are unaware of the artificiality of its genesis.
I am innately drawn to the rainbow shimmer of boat gasoline on the surface of a lake on the Monday of a long weekend. I am fascinated by the phenomenon of a bonfire burning intensely the color of whatever soda can is thrown in. I imagine the aesthetic impact of multiple types of landscape forced onto the same surface. Though there may be no wilderness in my work, there remains an uncontrolled natural world. Where earlier painters attempted to depict the great uninhabited expanse, I am depicting the infusion of this hybridized nature back into the body and mind. Waste leaves only to return.
Much of the imagery that I use comes from my upbringing in the Burned Over District of Upstate NY. This region was known for a wave of apocalyptic Christian movements in the early Nineteenth Century and was also the birthplace of Spiritualism and the American fascination with seances and spirits. This coincided with the reign of the Hudson River School painters who were uniting the ideas of landscape with divinity and exceptionalism. Unable to fully extricate myself from the ghosts of these seductive histories, I am left with a deep superstition that remains formless, individualized and connected to the act of painting itself. The objects I create are my attempts to find the visual language of familiarity and acceptance in an augmented natural world.
Could you tell us more about your background and how you began creating art?
I am a Philadelphia based painter, originally from Central New York State. I became serious about drawing in High School and afterward I studied privately with a painter who helped me develop an understanding of the science of oil paint. I used his encyclopedic knowledge and massive library to develop a deep relationship with painters like Courbet, Sargent, and the Hudson River School. Coming from a rural area and having a fondness for representation, I had to take an active role in learning about Modern and Contemporary Art. This process involved examining many of my preconceptions and value judgements. I began making abstract paintings in college, and was presented with questions like “why make a painting at all?” While I experimented with other mediums, I continued to paint even if I couldn’t find a good reason for doing so. Much later I was able to discern the way great Art worked on me, and the kinds of uncanny feelings great Art could induce. The quest for that sensation supplanted concerns of representation vs. figuration or other stylistic concerns. I now see my paintings as I believe they are, a series of chemical processes that can give way to both signifiers and sensations, with varying degrees of honesty and illusion.
What does your art aim to say to its viewers?
The Art objects that resonate with me the most are those that have an overwhelming sense of familiarity that begins to break down upon further inspection. I am interested in the feelings that surround our relationship to our environment, safety and comfort, unease and paranoia, curiosity and caution. These feelings carry over no matter what environment or interaction I am presented with. Coming from a rural area and now living in a city, I am aware of the vast difference in experience people can have with large undeveloped land, neighbors, and private property. To some, the woods can be a place of pristine beauty, for others a dangerous wild place to be avoided. The difference between a bonfire that is composed of burning trash or good oak can be visually imperceptible. I am interested in allowing viewers to come to a work of art and fully indulge their preconceptions, and then, discovering that the image may not necessarily reflecting what they are feeling.
Can you tell us about the process of creating your work? What is your daily routine when working?
I like to be working almost immediately in the morning. It’s a way to trick myself into starting, because once I start I can work for sixteen hours. Over the past two years I’ve had the ability to paint full time. I usually have multiple projects happening at once. Paintings will be drying while I work on others. I have a process of preparing more surfaces when a group of work is almost finished. I like to have a seamless flow of work being started, in progress, and in finishing stages. It is also important to have surfaces ready for a spontaneous idea or experiment. I originally kept the studio free of any creature comforts and distractions. Hard chairs, no fridge, bright overhead lighting. However over the last few years I have taken the complete opposite approach. I have brought all of the comforts of home into my studio, with the theory that these things would entice me to stay when I would otherwise succumb to laziness at home. I try to take advantage of small blocks of time to do things that do not require much creativity. This could be stretching canvases, cleaning brushes, applying final varnish. I spent a good amount of time trying to find the artistic investigations that would hold my interest for a lifetime. Now that I am starting to find that clarity, I am trying to take advantage of that it while it is here. So for now, I’ll be in the studio until I run out of ideas.
What is the essential element in your art?
Essential elements of my work are often things I wish I could leave behind. Doubt and dissatisfaction are unpleasant things to feel when making a work of art, but they act as the conflict that moves the work forward. My paintings often undergo big changes when I’m making them. I am rarely satisfied with my first idea which, if executed without reconsideration, feels too rigid. This can happen even in a work that is entirely abstract. Much of the process of creating a painting is identifying and disrupting “good design”. The images we see most regularly are produced by advertisers, designers, and individuals who are trying to mimic designers. The language of harmonious composition is a kind of native tongue to most visual artists. I make a conscious effort to resist this muscle memory, and to create compositions that are interesting not just within the painted frame, but also as an object in a room. I give similar consideration to the surface of a painting. Having made very direct paintings for a long time, I started revisiting the optical blending possible with thin glazes of oil paint. I strive to create a painted surface that can only be fully experienced in person, and could not have been fully planned. I am constantly asking myself: Why is this an oil painting? What is important about this being a painting and not a different type of image?
In your opinion, what role does the artist have in society?
Artists play a special role in society in that they deal with cultural overflow. As societies and cultures form, there are aspects of cultural production that do not fit neatly into the dominant system. This excess of feeling and form must be examined in order to better understand the structures that exclude them. If some of the items do not fit nicely into the drawer, then it may be time to explore whether the drawer is the right organizing system to use. The flip side of this dynamic would be kitsch, cultural production that is specially made to fit perfectly into the dominant culture. The most poignant example of this dynamic is in Manet’s Olympia, which troubled the art connoisseurs of the day precisely because it directly confronted them with their own desires. Manet was able to see that men were infatuated with nude portraits, but that the figures must be veiled in the pretext of classical mythology. In public the figures were “nude” not “naked”. In private they were still a form of refined pornography for upper-class gentlemen. Manet presented these men with a portrait of woman who was also an objectified sexual object, but one who is directly holding the viewer’s gaze. This made these men uncomfortable because they had to acknowledge that they were couching their desires in a plausible deniability and politeness required by the culture at the time. I believe there is a similar relationship to “the beauty of nature” that is a holdover from the Romantic period. Bucolic splendor and language of abundance work as a sort of nude portrait of Gaia, while the consequences of human activity have revealed this holy or “set-apart” perception of nature to be a fiction. Manet confronted viewers with the lie they had been telling themselves. The artist often feels the compulsion to say the quiet part out loud.
