A reader remarks that his favorite artist is Damien Hirst and asks Matt who his favorite artist is.

Matt responds:

Since I am not a student by any means, I haven’t studied art history in the extensive way that many people have.  In my first career as a funeral director, my wife and I would visit museums, and I was taken with the ability of the Old Masters to recreate on canvas the reality of life with a photorealist perfection in terms of the importance of light and shadow, the placement of the interactions of different planes, figures, furniture, animals, plants, etcetera.  At that point in my art education, I thought that probably Michelangelo and Raphael were the greatest.

Then I started looking at magazines and how some of the illustrators could take the character of people and allow you to make up a story to go with those characters.  With someone like Norman Rockwell, at an immediate glance, you know probably 90-percent of what’s going on in the scene.  To me, that was a great ability.  So was Norman Rockwell one of the great artists?

When I decided to become a student of art (and I would never allow myself to call myself an artist in the beginning), I began to feel, as I still feel today, that philosophically, Pablo Picasso was my guide, because of his unswerving quest for advancement in his work.  For him to be perceived a genius in his Blue Period or his Rose Period or one of his Cubist Periods, whatever he was doing, to him it wasn’t enough.  He didn’t live in that shadow of himself; he stepped out and then did something else that became different.  I have always admired his pilgrimage, his wandering, the power of his portrayal of the human condition, the verging on the abstract...

In my own art, it took me a long time to get to abstraction, and now I find myself deeply immersed in it.  So I have had many sirens calling to me through the years.  I still take great wonder and pleasure in looking at the different artists of the world.  Some of them I’m familiar with; others I have no idea who they are; but I can appreciate the journey that every artist sets out on.

This summer I was sitting in a very sparse, clean modernist hotel in Shannon, Ireland, and when I looked at the wall in the dining room, there were two great abstract paintings.  To me, they really stood out.  It would be the equivalent of putting two Rolls-Royces in a pig stye, or two Rembrandts in a modernist skyscraper.  I don’t know what it meant to me, but it intrigued me.

I think we’re all growing as artists all the time, and we’re probably all looking at different parts of paintings that we didn’t see before.  To me, that’s one of the great blessings of art:  the constant change.

Matt