A reader asks Matt whether his paintings are concerned with memory, and whether perhaps his paintings are memories of past lives.

Matt responds:

I purposefully paint while I listen to hard rock music, so that I’m not thinking.  I hope to open my mind and my whole self to the hidden forces and external forces that surround me and guide me to the creation of my art piece.  This sounds very mysterious and spiritual, but I just think it’s the way it is.

I purposefully entered my art career without any preconceived notions, rules, and regulations.  I entered as if I was going to be the first or only artist in the world, and there weren’t any do’s or don’t’s.  This is probably a ridiculous way to craft anything.  If we applied it to everything, we’d all have to invent our own wheel, our own wristwatch, and everything else.

But for myself, the definition of creating art is to take some sort of an idea that has no form and try to present it to myself in such a way that makes me think outside the box, to break the molds of the way I think, or the popular conceptions of how everyone else thinks.  When you think about that... some people are cold in a room while others are hot; some people think it’s too bright; others think it’s too dark.  When we get our coffee, some like it hot, some like it cold, but it’s all billed as coffee.  So my quest is to look at the possibility of agreements between peoples, even though we disagree on many levels.  How can we find things we agree upon and can argue and debate and hoot and holler about?  How can we find things we disagree about but give equal time to things we agree with?

Therefore, the subject matter of my work is a probably a hodgepodge of what’s going on in my mind.  My first artistic advisor was a Catholic nun that left the Order, married a divorced Jewish man, and is now studying to be an ordained Christian minister.  She said to me at one point:  “Lamb, you never can go and paint on a quiet island all by yourself; you need the agitation of the world to keep your fire burning within you, the fire of rage at what’s going on, of love, of exploration.”  She said, “At the end of two years on a beautiful tropical island, you’d be painting butterflies and rosebuds, and you’d be painting pabulum.”

So every day I’m fired up about something, and I try to work it out on my canvas, using whatever spirits I think are agitating or laughing with me or at me or pushing and pulling me, whether they be inside me or in my imagination or if they’re actually there in reality.  I won’t know the full extent of this until I’m six feet under.  So I have a lot to look forward to, even when I close my eyes.

Matt