In 2013, my nearly 20-year career in marketing began to give way to a rekindled interest in art.
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A rekindled interest in art-making, that is.
Up to then, my creative endeavors had been in the service of commerce—but I felt it was time for a more personal form of expression. In particular, painting was an area I felt I hadn’t pushed far enough when I put down the pencils and brushes after college, to pursue a commercial career. It was time to paint again!
At about the same time, a designer acquaintance was working on the lobby of a luxury condo building in Atlanta. While in the planning stages, he said, “I’d love to place some graphic, large-scale artwork in this lobby, but I haven’t been able to find quite the right thing. Why don’t you give it a try?” So, not only was I just starting to paint again after more than 20 years, my first gig was a five-foot-by-six-foot canvas for a public space! Of course I said “yes”—and once my work was installed, the door opened to other commissions and placements at retail and in galleries.
My philosophy is simple: I make art that I collect and enjoy, non-objective works that offer possibilities of interpretation and meaning, picking up where New York School painters of the 1950s left off. A lifelong lover of typography, I tend toward the calligraphic, often rendering gestural, abstract tangles of almost-discernible letterforms.
A variety of motifs and techniques informs my work. The common thread is an interest in motion as method, another extension of the Action Painters’ program of “rendering the energy and movement of life in a visible way on the canvas.”
Working primarily in acrylic paint on canvas, I also incorporate paper shreds, sand, pencil, gold leaf, natural fibers, and other media. When considering these materials, I often contrast high and low: gold leaf on corrugated cardboard, for instance, or silk fibers on cotton canvas.
At times, I dispense with the program entirely, in favor of stretching in a different direction. Like the installation I designed and painted for a showhouse, made up of more than 400 six-inch square canvases. Or the time I painted a wraparound mural on the wall of my powder room.
Michael Matascik, Lord of the Manor. 2016. Acrylic on 438 canvases, 6 x 6 x 0.5 inches each. Private collection
Following historical archetypes, this portrait takes the lord of the manor as its subject—and carries it to a selfie-inspired extreme in the foyer of a historic home that served as a designer showhouse in suburban Atlanta.
Inspired by an old family portrait I found among the remains of this long-neglected property, the larger-than-life depiction of the home’s patriarch is composed of more than 400 six-inch canvas modules. Up close, the installation reads as abstract color-blocking; from a distance, the modules coalesce and the subject’s features emerge.
Inspired by an old family portrait I found among the remains of this long-neglected property, the larger-than-life depiction of the home’s patriarch is composed of more than 400 six-inch canvas modules. Up close, the installation reads as abstract color-blocking; from a distance, the modules coalesce and the subject’s features emerge.
My paintings have been installed in residential and commercial environments across the United States. Though the works shown here are spoken for, a small number are in inventory. Contact me to see more or to commission a work of your own.
