Where did you grow up, and where do you live currently? I grew up in Mason City, Iowa. I currently live in Los Angeles.
How would you describe Matthew Sweesy? Just a normal guy trying to cram the Big-Bang back into his heart.
Did you have any official training for art? Not really. I took one evening class at the School of Visual Arts called “Beginning Oil Painting” when I lived in New York. Other than that, my formal art instruction is limited to what the Mason City Public School system provided.
How long have you been making art and what lead you to start? When I was about five or six years old, I became fascinated by my uncle Marty who was an artist with schizophrenia. His studio was in the attic of my grandparents’ home. It was a magical place to me where it felt like you could make anything your mind dreamed up. When the smells of turpentine and oil paint crossed wires with his paintings of airplanes, flowers and pin-up girls, my little brain exploded into a desire to do this myself one day. I have always been interested in images. As a child, I found comfort in drawing. During college and for about ten years thereafter, I was focused mostly on writing as a means to exercise my visions. However, the writing, which was heavily image driven, began to feel like visual art to me, so I began to explore drawing and painting my poems instead of writing them.
Is there any reality behind your paintings or are they purely fantasy? To me it is all real. Though the images may seem dislocated from or unfamiliar to what we see in our day to day lives, they are the physical and psychological manifestations of my most truthful experiences in terms of what it means for me to be alive and connected with the world.
Have you ever come across a piece of art that you could not or did not want to stop looking at? For me Ovid’s Metamorphoses is like looking into the sun. The intensity of the imagery alone is enough to explode my eyeballs should I stare at it too long.
How did you acquire your style? By consistently showing up and making work. It is like learning a new language. There is no better alternative to learning a new language than full immersion into the culture where the language is spoken. Learning one word of Japanese per week is never going to cut it. Similarly, by working everyday on my own work and letting it surround me, I began to hear a chatter back and forth between the drawings. My style is the result of listening to these dialogues and continuing to work in order to more deeply understand its vocabulary.
What influences you as an artist? Music, physics and fear.
What kinds of art hang on the walls of your home? Mostly the work of friends whose art inspires me such as Daniel Gibson, Camille Schefter and Daniel Schubert.
How do you describe success as an artist? The success for me as an artist can come only within the act of creating. It is the feeling of being along for the ride as something creates itself. In that moment, I am most aware of what it feels like to be alive and truly connected to something beyond my comprehension.
Do you have a place/person/thing that you visit for inspiration? Old notebooks filled with broken poems and old phone numbers are usually good engines for kick-starting memory and emotion. Staring at the ocean, sky and mountains, especially if birds are around, can really do it for me too. Recently, I have been exploring the drawings I made as a child and the books I was looking at before I could read, which were mostly cowboy books with a lot of great pictures. They are like doorways into old dreams.
Name three things you can’t live without in your studio? All I really need is a surface and something I can use to make a mark.
If you could have dinner with 3 artists living/dead who would be at your table? Louise Bourgeois, Sergei Prokofiev and Fernando Pessoa.
How would someone find you on Social media? @matthewsweesy on instagram.
