Can you describe the first time you felt compelled to make a narrative image? I remember doing some drawings when I was in grade school that were like story-performance pictures. Lots of kids do this. You draw an environment (mine were always landscapes viewed from the side without depth), and then add people, cars, whatever.
Your work spans painting, animation, sculpture, and music. How do you decide which medium best suits the story you want to tell? .Everything I do starts with drawing. Sometimes an idea comes to me as a still image; others as a sequence. Either way, I grid sketchbook pages and make small graphite drawings. The images that occur to me as stills tend to become paintings, and the sequences become animations. I don’t really have a process for sculptures because I make them so infrequently. For a while, I made them because they had an inside where I could conceal an MP3 player. This was before I made animations, so the sound (recorded interviews) was a way to include linear narratives in the work.
Can you describe your studio environment and how it facilitates your creative process? Are there any particular rituals or routines you adhere to while working? I have my studio broken up into a few spaces. I have a room outside of my home where I go to paint. There aren’t any books or comfortable chairs there. I just paint and take walks in the nearby woods. At home, I draw at the kitchen table, which is also where I look at books, stare out the window, reply to emails, and write answers to interview questions. I’ve worn out half of the chairs from the set we have in our kitchen. I also have a small office/animation studio in our laundry room. There are blackout shades on the windows and equipment for doing my videos. I have a separate set of matte paints there since they photograph well. I like to draw either first thing in the morning or just after getting my daughter to bed in the evening. The process feels meditative. If I’ve struggled with a painting during the day, the drawing in the evening lets go of that problem-solving mentality. I might sketch the same subject but from a different point of view or without the whole context. Other times, drawing (gouache, graphite, ink) is a kind of play. I like working without a goal and without any desire to succeed. Just showing up and moving the material around is enough. I tend to make a schedule for my week since life is always encroaching on studio time. I’ll put outside obligations into the calendar so I can forget about them until it’s time to take care of them. Then I will schedule a few blocks of time, if possible, to do animation. I find the animations work best if I give them no more than a half day at a go—otherwise, I burn out. The remaining work time is for painting.
Your paintings often feature vivid colors like midnight blues and hot pinks. How do you use color to convey the emotional tone of your subjects? Color resists one-to-one translations for me, which is why I enjoy it so much. When I’m thinking about a painting, I might choose a color palette because it makes me think of a time of day or time of year, and it is connected with the quality of light (daylight in summer or TV glow at midnight). In others, there might be an object—a hi-vis worker’s vest, for instance—that decides the palette. In almost every case, the palette of my paintings evolves over the course of the painting. I begin my canvases with a fairly abstract process of smearing and moving color around (as opposed to drawing out an image and developing it). The results are often unexpected. I read once that Goethe would push on his eye to try to see prismatic effects of color. Good painting can be like a poke in the eye. Color and light can be such a shock to me, a jolt, a disruption to the everyday. These ruptures are often central to the experience of looking at my work—for me first. Rather than planning the color, I’m looking for these moments where I feel like some third hand has catalyzed the picture, vivifying the experience.
You’ve mentioned a dramatic event in your father’s life—a near-fatal stabbing—that influenced your art, including the recurring motif of a 1970 Z28 Camaro. How do personal family stories inform your creative process? I draw upon my life whenever I’m making my work. Since I don’t paint directly from photos, it helps to work with subjects and locations I’ve experienced directly. Much of the work I’ve done in recent years is set in a fictional, central Missouri town near where my grandma lived in the Lake of the Ozarks region. It’s helpful for me to have a place where the work exists when I’m not around to make it. I feel like it’s waiting for me and I can go and move through that space. Before beginning this body of work, I often spoke to family members about their experiences and tried to work from their memories to construct images, but these personal stories are now fictionalized. Bits and pieces get cobbled together with invention to make something new.
What role does sound play in your animations, and how do you approach sound design in relation to image-making? I use sound to add layers of emotional complexity. Voiceover tends to create an empathetic entry point for the viewer, and the quality of a voice can add emotional resonance. I like working with non-actors because I want to keep the performance feeling real. I don’t like overly polished stuff. There’s a writerly side to me that likes writing monologues, so the narration lets me stretch into that territory. I often get the ideas for my animations when I’m listening to music or field recordings. I collect short samples of both and move them into a folder for when I’m editing. Even a field recording of a distant train can provide a sense of place that helps me to imagine an image sequence. Music can provide this too.
You work in series that often reflect a particular emotional or psychological atmosphere, like Labor Day or Between the Days. Do you see these series as chapters in a larger story, or do they stand alone? I think they are related but not I part of a larger narrative arc. Maybe they’re all different windows onto the same house. I think that Between the Days was probably my best series in terms of a long sustained effort at a single storyline. But even there, I imagine the video and the paintings differently. It’s almost as though the same event is being told by two different characters with different points of view.
How do you balance the tension between realism and abstraction in your work? I like walking a line. There are certainly realist elements in the work—recognizable subjects, settings, and compositions—but there’s a healthy degree of stylization as well. Some of this comes from the materials and tools I use (like airbrush), and some comes from an interest in cartoons, comics, and children’s book illustration. I don’t want my work to ever become a series of pictures of things. If it’s just a couch or a person, then the painting is dead. The elements have to be activated. Sometimes that means leaning into realism, and other times it means stylization or even an abstract push.
Looking forward, what themes or stories are you eager to explore that you haven’t yet? I’m starting a new animation project set in a seasonal Halloween store that occupies an abandoned strip mall storefront. I’m interested in exploring ideas around masquerade, fear, and identity. I haven’t fully figured out the scope of the project, but I’ve been sketching and trying to figure out characters. I think I want to include trick-or-treaters and suburban night scenes. It might include a haunted house too.
Works like Cold Drinks (2023) address the futility of labor in a mechanized world. How do you balance critique with empathy in these narratives? I try to resist creating a summary expression of the world I’m painting. I trust the viewer to enter the work and make that meaning.
You’ve taught painting and drawing at the university level, including upcoming courses at Cornell. How does teaching influence your own artistic practice? Teaching often reminds me of what I love about making art. The materials, color, play—all the good stuff is there in a course. It’s really gratifying to see students get better—they grow so quickly, particularly in the early studios. On many occasions, I’ve found myself saying things to students that I really need to hear. It can be a good reminder.
Your work has been compared to the documentary photography of Walker Evans and Robert Frank. How do you balance documentary realism with fictional elements in your art? I don’t think of my work as realist, although I understand that it’s full of specific, recognizable things and people. Since the figures I paint are invented, I don’t think the balance you mention is there. But it’s true—I’m interested in the work of photographers like Stacy Kranitz, who question documentary as a form even while working wi l thin communities and through close relationships with her subjects. In a way, I have a very close relationship to my subjects too, but in a manner completely contrasting to a documentary practice.
Your recent exhibition Homecoming (June 28–July 26, 2025) at François Ghebaly Gallery explores new themes. Can you share what inspired this show and how it builds on your previous work? That show has two anchoring works: the titular painting Homecoming and Dawn, a stop-motion animation that took six years to make. I thought of Homecoming as a cross-section of the small town where so many of my works are set. It’s the largest painting I’ve made—12 feet across with 20 figures. This bigger scale let me include a wider view of my community. Dawn, by contrast, focused intensely on the title character in one variable day of her life. Each time the animated loop restarts, her day is slightly different, as she works at a CVS and tries to face everyday struggles—from car troubles to an imperious boss. This exhibition builds on the themes of work and precariousness from earlier paintings but simultaneously offers both a wider and more intimate point of view.
Curating Blind Field at 1969 Gallery, you explored the concept of a “double inside” in painting. How does this idea manifest in your own work? When curating that show, I was trying to apply Roland Barthes’ idea of the blind field to painting (he was writing about photography). I like the idea that the space of a painting might continue beyond the frame—that the painting could imply that continuum. In my own work, this relates to the sense of place—that all of these images exist in one town. My animations allow me to move that frame, to both work with the surface of the painting and move beyond it.
You’ve received prestigious residencies and fellowships, like those at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. How have these opportunities shaped your artistic development? Having fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center gave me the space and time to make my work without the pressures of having a job. Just before I did my first fellowship at FAWC, I quit painting so I used that first year to make nothing but drawings, and I overhauled my process. I don’t know that I could have done that without the support of a residency.
Who or what are some of your most significant artistic influences, both within and outside the visual arts? I’m always looking, so you’ll get different answers from me depending on what I’ve seen most recently. When painting Homecoming, I was looking at the 19th-century painter George Caleb Bingham. His best paintings are of men working on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. But he also painted small-town and rural life, and I found a few images with a red shadow that I lifted for Homecoming. A few weeks back, I was thinking about Diego Marcon’s films. I’m drawn to his approach to structure—that each project has a very specific and distinct relationship to form. I’m into the way his film The Parents’ Room disrupts a very commonplace setting with masks and singing. For stop-motion approaches, I often come back to Caroline Leaf. In her adaptation of The Metamorphosis, she animates a lot of transitions that in live action would have been a cut. She helped me see some of the ways animation is distinct from other forms of filmmaking. Kerry James Marshall’s works from the ’90s and ’00s have had a big influence on me. His way of staging a scene, combined with a broad orchestration of painterly moves—all while centering experience on his figures and often their gaze, looking back at me—it’s really powerful. I read a lot—more novels than anything else—and those are often on my mind. More often than not, I’m listening to an audiobook while I paint. In the last year or so, I’ve really enjoyed Ali Smith’s work and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead.
Looking ahead, what new themes, mediums, or stories are you eager to explore in your future projects? I’m working on an animation set in the waiting room of the auto repair shop that appears in Half Past, in my show at François Ghebaly. The business is owned by a father and his son, and they’re the only characters seen in the video. It allows me to spend some time with their relationship—even though they don’t interact much. The video is also a portrait of a struggling business.
IWhat is the most challenging aspect of your artistic practice, and how do you approach overcoming it? Working with painting, you spend most of your time alone—so I suppose that isolation can be a challenge. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve tried to find more of a balance between studio time and other things—types of work, being a parent, social time, talking on the phone, going to NYC to look at art, teaching. This summer, I moved to a temporary studio in an area of town near some woods. I’ve been taking walks most days. I still haven’t explored all the paths, and many of them peter out, so I end up scrambling up slopes or through brush—but it’s a lovely break. It shifts my focus and makes going back into the studio more fun.
What role does feedback and critique play in your artistic development? I have the habit of photographing my work each day and then sharing it with my wife and daughter, my sibling, or friends. When the work is a struggle, I’ve learned to avoid taking in-progress shots or I wind up torturing myself—but I do sometimes solicit feedback from a couple of painter-friends whose opinions I trust.
How would someone find you on social media? I’m on Instagram at @mattlbollinger
