STATEMENT

“My painting is a sensual combination of surrealism and cubism.”

- Matthew McDonnell

I was born in Brooklyn and raised a block away from the Brooklyn Museum.

As a boy I attended summer workshops at the museum. There the collection of Eskimo masks, totem poles, and Egyptian caskets, covered with hieroglyphs, left an impression on me of the power of the figure in mystery and the occult.

The expressiveness of the human body, the figurative, the gesture came to me studying the drawings of Michelangelo, a topography of flesh. With the MoMA exhibition, “Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective” in 1980, the power of cubism and the liberty of surrealism were manifested.

Painting began earnestly when I was a senior in high school. I moved rapidly toward cubism and surrealism. My interests were in Picasso and Braque. I studied the work of Paul Klee more closely, and then the “totemic” Pollock of the early 1940s. Gorky and de Kooning interested me also.

Attending Brooklyn College I took classes in Classical Greek art, in particular, on the Black and Red Figure vase painting. Later on, I became interested in the works of the floating world—the ukiyo-e of Japan. From these traditions and other cultures in world art I saw that everything in the art of mankind except European realism is surreal—is direct art.

Listening to the music of the modern masters, Stravinsky, Boulez, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, I realized that there was a modern dialectic. The modern art of our time must be based on the direct art of cultures around the world and the work of our modern predecessors—the immediate art of mankind.

I am a figurative painter: multiplying the figurations and gestures, interlacing the imagery as a puzzle. Developed and embellished, hidden and joined: yet through this elaboration the figure can still be recognized and revealed.

My work is always of the figure. I multiply the figurations and imagery using the hint and enigma. I prefer the suggestion of the possible without delineating the actual.

So it is with the human figure in my painting: hidden and veiled, joined or dispersed it is still there.

CLICK HERE TO READ " An Idea to Find" TO LEARN MORE ABOUT MATTHEW'S CREATIVE PROCESS