29-year-old artist Matt Leines is certainly not for everyone’s tastes, but he certainly is to mine. Gaining fans, and buyers, over the last several years, in 2009 Leines published his first monograph, entitled Matt Leines: You are Forgiven, and thus garnered even more attention as he made a renewed round of gallery appearances and book signings. It was during this time that I spoke to him and got to delve into the mind of this deliberate, soft-spoken artist.
At once visually inviting and conceptually inscrutable, Leines’ ink drawings, woodcuts and watercolors weave narratives of a hidden land populated with bearded seafarers, marauding jungle beasts and vigilant demigods wielding lightning bolts from the sky. Primal in their essence, his creations traverse archetypical landscapes; they beckon memories of things simple, sinister, legendary: an archer aims his bow while riding a ram in one particular work; a hirsute, flesh-eating monster gobbles unwary woodsmen in another. Leines’ is a world of familiar make-believe - one that is as tantalizing as it is unsettling.
Here are a couple of questions posed to Leines, appearing in their entirety in Issue 33 of Filter:
You are perhaps best known for your drawings and smaller pieces, but you create large works as well. When the scope changes, does your process change, too?
Matt Leines: Everything starts as a sketch. To be honest, that’s my favorite part - filling sketchbooks. But, I was unsure how that would translate to large scale. Then, I figured out if I could change the line width or just make things the same as the drawing - but just ridiculously big - I could make it work. I finally decided that even though it’s bigger, it’s still the same vantage point. Usually my drawings aren’t something that will pull you in from across the room; if you look at them from far away, they’re just a big mess of color. But with large-scale stuff, it’s basically just a giant version of my drawings which engages you from a distance - it’s all because of the scale.
Did formal training help you discover different approaches to your art?
Matt Leines: I don’t think I was taught how to make art. Every problem I’ve ever had was figuring out how materials work together. It’s just been trial and error. We had technique classes at RISD and I didn’t learn anything, but that is my fault for not caring about it. It’s not what I was taught there, but what I learned. I had two really great teachers who would give me an idea, and I’d have to try to find a way to convey a message without being super literal; try to find an interesting approach to the problem at hand. And that’s how my style came about - trying to do things that were different and explained things differently.
- P.S.
Matt Leines on ArtNet
Matt Leines on ArtSlant
* All images are the property of Matt Leines
0 comments:
Post a Comment