Interview by Jimon

1) How would you describe matt Chambers? As Fred Astaire once said, “I don’t take myself seriously, but I take my work very seriously”.

2) Currently you live in Montana; did you move there from Los Angeles to paint the new series “Montana Wildflowers I Imagine I’ll See in the Spring”? I moved to Montana because I saw Los Angeles forcing my hand as an artist.  I wanted to see what I would think about, or rather not think about in a drastically different environment.

3) Do you remember the first piece of art you created? How old where you? I used to line my possessions end to end snaking through my childhood home, if you can call that art.  I must have been 5 or 6.  I wasn’t really interested in drawing till much later.

4) When did you realize you want to create art as a profession? I thought I was going to make pretentious art films and then I realized I preferred not to collaborate with anyone.  Around the same time I became more aware of the possible freedoms of art for a man like me.  Experiencing  LA’s Chinatown boom of the early 2000’s was what sealed it.  The denizens were weird and the market came to the artists and galleries who took risks.

5) Your work is extremely diverse, what is the inspiration behind such abstract diversity? I imagine it must seem like that from everyone else’s perspective – but I tend to think my different groups of paintings as conversations, and I maintain lots of evolving conversations.  Also, I tend to think of myself as an artist who makes paintings as opposed to a painter- so this body of work is “paintings” no matter what the form/content.

6) How do you choose the colors in your pieces?  I’m pretty random when setting up a palette, but as I paint I tend to gravitate towards a certain color or color combinations, and when I do monochromatic works it’s usually because I’m thinking about a specific color or colors for longer. I have quite bad vision, and I tend to take my glasses off when I paint, so color is the first thing I deal with before shape.  But my choices of color and color editing are informed by my experience looking at the color without my glasses.

7) What is success to matt Chambers? Feeling understood.

8) What advice would you give putative collectors? It’s the growth between an artist’s works that one should look at.

9) Best advice you ever received in regards to your career as an artist? If you wanna do a show, ask your friends to show at their apartment.  Ask a Chinese restaurant or a dry cleaners, it doesn’t matter, just get used to using your language.

10) Do you have a place/person/thing that you visit for inspiration? I chop wood and carry water.

11) If you could have dinner with 3 artists living/dead who would be at your table? Give me the trio that got my art fire lit- Joel Mesler, Mark Von Schlegell, and Robbie Kinburg.

12) Name three things you can’t live without in your studio? Something to make marks with, glasses, and a little solitude.

13)  Anything else you’d like to mention that I didn’t ask? Thanks for taking the time to ask me these!