Matthew Cole with 'The Bear' at BEERS London
Up until my junior year of high school, a lot of my interests revolved around athletics. It was around that time that I realized I’d become less and less interested in participating in organised sports. “Riding the bench” was not working for me, and I felt I needed to find another sense of purpose or satisfaction in life. That’s when I began hanging out with different kids at school – musicians, skateboarders, and artists. That was the first time I had been exposed to the arts. I was always drawing around the margins of my notebooks in school. I was also a terrible student, haha. I eventually bought sketchbooks, or “black books,” to draw in, and I would take them everywhere – I loved the portability of this format. Drawing in these books was like journaling for me – it became my outlet. I would feed off of and get influenced by what my friends were drawing, the music they were making, and the music I was listening to. This was the first time I felt the urge to make images, and it became an essential form of therapy.
When did visual art stop being an interest or talent and become a decision you were willing to organise your life around—and what did you have to give up to make that real?
The first time I decided to really structure my life around art was when I started applying for art school. Once I enrolled at Tyler in Philadelphia, it was like, okay, you’re committed now. You’ve moved to another city, to another school, to do this. I was more aware then that this was an investment being made – that’s when I started taking it more seriously. I think one thing all artists give up during their pursuit is stability. I guess one thing I’ve given up are any expectations of a stable, linear career path. There are constant ups and downs to being an artist. There’s constant moments of despair and rejection that also make the high notes feel incredibly rewarding.
Which early influences (artists, films, books, music, places) shaped you the most, and at what point did you realise you had to remove those influences to find your own voice?
Japan is a place that’s had an enormous effect on me and my approach as a painter. In 2018, I did a residency in Okayama, outside of Kyoto, to try my hand at the traditional ukiyo-e woodblock printing. I didn’t excel with this process, but I applied some of it to my painting practice. A lot of my heroes from art history were also figures who were seduced by the imagery that was flooding the European borders during the Meiji Restoration. My experience in Japan reaffirmed why I’ve gravitated towards these artists. Van Gogh, Vuillard, Toulouse-Lautrec – all of these artists were deeply influenced by Japanese wood block prints.
Carl Jung’s autobiographical book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” was a big one for me. It’s an incredibly visual read. His writings on his own visions inspired me to pay attention and interpret my own. I became really interested in psychology and dream analysis after reading this one, and it definitely had an impact on how I approach my painting.
2001: Space Odyssey is up there as far as early film influences go. I recently saw it on 35 mm in the theatre at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York with a friend. Its static energy is incredible. Every still is a beautiful painting to me. The cyclical nature of the plot is very telling. I’m interested in how the idea of the passage of time is displayed throughout the movie. This is something that’s very challenging to do for painters because we are working with still images. There’s no beginning, middle and end in paintings.
Music in general is essential to my daily life, and definitely propels a lot of the momentum in my studio. There are so many albums, spanning a wide range of genres, that I’ve regularly revisited over the years. Talking Heads, “Stop Making Sense”, Rodriguez’s “Cold Fact”, Company Flow – “Funcrusher Plus”, just to name a few. These are “front-to-back listens” – albums I can listen to all the way through in the studio. Brian Eno’s “Apollo” is a masterpiece that sticks out. It’s more of a conceptual art piece if you really think about it. It’s frontier music. Before he produced the album, he had watched 35 mm footage of the Apollo missions, interviewed and spent time with astronauts from the Apollo voyage, and found that a common thread amongst them was their love for country music. He then applied country-esque pedal steel guitar rifts to his ambient sound. It’s a genius fusion of what can be described as two different forms of “frontier music”.
All of these art forms, and certainly traveling, have played into and continue to play into my work. At one point, I realised I had practiced, seen, and heard enough that I could then apply my own experience to my work – to report back. I think once I realised that my work required a certain level of engagement, if it were ever to materialise into something of my own, was when I realised I needed to find and develop my own voice.
Did you have a mentor who genuinely changed your trajectory? If not, what did you build in their absence? What did you learn the hard way that a mentor might have saved you from?
This is a great question. Every weekend of the last few months of art school, I would take the Chinatown bus to New York to intern and observe in the studio of the Norwegian artist Vebjørn Sand. He had an old loft studio down on Franklin Street in Tribeca, and once I finished school, I decided to move to New York and work for him full-time as an assistant there. In art school, I had experimented with so many different forms of art making within a conceptual curriculum that, in a way, I had left feeling more confused about which lane to take than when I had enrolled.
Moving to New York to work for a classically trained painter was incredibly grounding at the time, and gave me a chance to revisit the basics, and most importantly, observe a working artist on a daily basis. Vebjorn and I come from two completely different artistic backgrounds, though I was able to translate and eventually apply so much of what I learned from those six years into my own practice. I was exposed to so much during those years. I travelled a lot with Vebjorn. He took me to Norway and to Paris and the Louvre for the first time, and repeatedly to Berlin, where he had a residency. We spent a month travelling around Spain, in the Basque Country. So many of my formative memories and influences came from this period in my life.
Your work is described as “quietly, psychologically charged.” How do you decide which medium or material is capable of carrying that psychological weight—and what new materials have changed the way you think, not just the way you paint?
In my most recent body of work I showed at Beers London, I think a lot of the emotional undertones were mostly driven by the new materials I had been using to make the paintings. In late 2024, I had gone to do a residency in a very remote part of Canada, in Newfoundland. My objective there was to experiment with new methods and materials and try to develop new motifs with them. One new material which I think made a pretty profound impact was switching to working on linen and allowing the material to remain exposed in some areas. I think it can be a very rich material to work with, and a more interesting alternative to negative space. Also, up north, I started incorporating masking fluid in my practice, and using this as a drawing tool, and way to create hard lines, in contrast to other areas of painting approached with pastels and oil sticks. I began to develop a more diverse formula up there. I think it’s this specific combination of material that helps create a certain tone to the overall body of work.
Different materials work for different paintings – the logic behind a lot of these decisions is often based on practicality or chemistry. I’m not sure any new materials have changed the way I think, but certainly the way I work. My most recent body of work had a lot of mixed media, which required a certain order of operations and time management as well. For a few of the paintings, I built them up in acrylics, and then went over some areas with oils, and oil sticks, and in some cases worked with both mediums simultaneously. This kind of work requires “note-taking” and organisation/separation of materials in the studio. This is when the studio becomes a bit of a chemistry lab, haha. Different pigments and binders dry at different rates. Working on multiple works in this fashion, with a deadline for shipping internationally, took a lot of time management and overall awareness of the progress of the series. You don’t want to be stuck with a bunch of wet oil paintings when it comes time to roll a series of canvases on a tube to ship to London, haha.
You’ve said, “I may begin with a faint idea, but the result often diverges entirely.” How do you know the divergence is productive discovery rather than avoidance, indecision, or aesthetic comfort?
A lot of decisions I make in the studio are based purely on intuition. When something is not working, it’s hard to describe why, and the same goes for when something is working. I spend a lot of time in my studio just looking and searching for that moment or place to jump in. It’s sort of like surfing. I just know when it’s time to pivot after a certain amount of time and observation. I know these pivots have been successful when I follow through and actually finish the painting, haha. A lot of my paintings become abandoned, but I keep them around, sometimes for years in my studio, and then I will come back to them and layer something new.
Your recent paintings prioritise domestic and interior spaces—rooms, objects, windows, drapes. What do interiors allow you to confess that landscapes don’t, and what do they let you hide?
This a great question. At some point, I had realised that working within an interior format is a much more effective way to convey a narrative in my work. Architecture allows a way to structure more narrative driven work than paintings that depict the open air, or landscape cannot. It provides a framework for me to then tell a story. I can be much more specific and descriptive in what I’m depicting in these sort of environments. Floors, walls, shelves, tabletops- these are all surfaces to lay a narrative upon, with figures, objects, symbolism, etc. It’s much easier to define a specific era, or a time with interior paintings, than it is to date a landscape, because the natural world is timeless. Regardless of the setting, this is the kind of quality I strive for in my work.
You’ve described each painting as a chapter in an ongoing autobiographical narrative. Where do you draw the line between emotional truth and personal exposure—especially when the motifs feel “deeply personal” but remain uncannily familiar to viewers?
What I meant by this was that often so much time elapses throughout the process of making just one painting. For this reason, I work on many at a time. This allows me to move to other works when I feel stuck – it helps keep the momentum up, and what happens interestingly is that each painting tends to inform the next one – a dialogue is created within the room. This long stretched out period of working (sometimes years or more) creates this sense that the works have lived alongside me, or grown with me. I look back at certain years and the images I’ve created during them help me recall the chronology of the time that’s passed. It’s a sort of Jungian perspective, I guess you could say.
I’m not sure I’m trying to draw a line between emotional truth and personal exposure. I mean a lot of my images reference personal events that I’ve felt an urge to “record” or “translate” somehow, but a lot of these events are common or universal.
After Newfoundland (Pouch Cove), you expected the external world to enter the work as a seascape, yet it “turned inward” into interiors. What do you think that pivot revealed about what you were actually searching for—and what did it disappoint you to learn?
What was most interesting to me was how the works in “Cabin Fever” transformed upon my return to New York into even tighter, claustrophobic spaces. The paintings then started to mimic my reality – I wasn’t in the Canadian wilderness anymore; I was back in the confined working space of my New York studio. Maybe what this pivot revealed was that I was searching for was actually closer to home than I thought. I just needed to put these subjects under a lens.
There are hints of the Canadian land/seascape in several works in the exhibition, though they are either reflections or views from outside, from an interior window, or painted over with architectural space.
I had explained a vivid dream of mine once to Donald Kuspit, and his interpretation was similar to how I interpreted the transformation of this series. In very nice words, he’d explained that I was “lost at sea” and that I needed to “come back to shore”.
You draw on Atlantic Canada’s traditions of song and storytelling. What does narrative do inside your paintings—does it structure them, haunt them, or destabilise them? Moreover, how do you keep “story” from becoming an illustration?
There’s definitely an ambiguity in my work that prevents me from ever being a successful illustrator. Illustration is a much more defined, articulate approach to image-making. I like to suggest things in my work, rather than push meaning onto the viewer. At the end of the day, it’s for the audience to interpret. I enjoy hearing the perspective of the receiving end, it’s more exciting for me to hear how someone else perceives these images. Everyone is different. Everyone views things differently.
During your residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson in 2020, due to the pandemic, isolation became part of the work’s conditions. What did that period expose about your relationship to routine, community, and validation—and what parts of that isolation do you suspect you still carry into the studio now?
It certainly affirmed that my practice is always something I can rely on as a means to cope. I felt incredibly blessed to have my practice, especially at the time of the pandemic. Painting is not a social sport, at least the production side of it usually isn’t. All the social aspects of it typically come later, or in the form of peer intervention or studio visits. I had already built up a certain immunity towards solitude, though the covid era was an extreme version of this. Working through this long period of isolation was a great practice and test for the long solitary road ahead.
One thing that the administration at MOCA Tucson represents and certainly displayed during that time was their kindness and aid for their community. My program was originally supposed to be a month long, though due to the circumstances, they accommodated me for 3 months in the museum. On most days, I was the only person present in the entire 12,000 sq foot museum. I’m not sure how I would have made it through the early days of COVID without their generosity and hospitality.
In your An Artist in Isolation video, you say, “I use my painting as an artistic weapon.” Who—or what— are you aiming that weapon at today (yourself, the market, art history, a personal past), and what current project is pushing you into genuinely new territory rather than refining what already works?
I’d say it’s more a tool or a shield against the perpetual onslaught of visual information we absorb, rather than an offensive weapon. Its meditational. It allows me to sit and process it all, with the output of a single image. I wouldn’t say I’m waving my brush at the market, but I will say I’m waving it against certain forces at work. I take pride in still focusing on a handmade craft. I’m currently back in my studio, working in the very early stages of some new works – this time with more of a focus on figuration. It’s too early to tell or say what is going to happen, but my goal is to keep pushing until new discoveries are made. I’m excited to see where my new body of work leads to.
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Matthew Cole mural project photographed by Evan Joseph. Images courtesy of the artist
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