I am constantly looking for breakthroughs, probably fooling myself into thinking I’m forging into new frontiers.

I recently saw a documentary about Yellowstone National Park, and how when the white men came across the mountains, they boasted that they were the first ones to see it.  Their guides were Native Americans, of course, and they said, “All they had to do was ask us, and we would have told them what was here.”

So sometimes it occurs to me that the wheel has been invented, and we’re just finding uses for it.

Where are the boundaries that we think we’re pushing through?  I suppose you could say that if you had an education, you’d know what the boundaries are.  But I’m not so sure that anyone really knows what the boundaries are, much less where they are.

To find new ways of mixing colors, materials, to learn the viscosity of different fluids, how they accept and reject each other, how temperature predetermines how materials interact—and in our own experience, how timid we are, how bold we are, and how, instead of tiptoeing through the tulips, we crawl, we roll, we march, we fly, we skip, to change the pace...

That, to me, is the essence of my art:  constantly trying to push the boundaries of my own anticipations, trying to tear down the wall that only I have built around myself and peer into some great abyss, thinking, “I think I’ll jump in there, hoping that some divine bird, hand, or parachute will save me from my own folly.”

So far it has.

I’ll keep jumping and testing.  That’s what I do.

The reality is, I never know what I’m going to do when I get up in the morning, although at night I dream of all the different possiblities.  It encourages me to keep wandering on my pilgrimage.

Matt