hands at 10 and 2 matt blackwell
jUNE 5 - 28, 2025
Opening reception, Thurs., June 5, 5-7pm
ARTIST STATEMENT
The mileposts were streaming past, that old Trans Am was dying hard, two wheels in the grass. — Neil Young
Everybody's going somewhere I heard it in a dream, but when there's too much of nothing it just makes a fellah mean. — Bob Dylan
I've been painting cars for about twenty-five years. It's a subject I return to in my work when I run out of ideas. The forms and lines give me something to go after that has a certainty and rigor that pulls me from the ditch of painting’s endless ambiguity. Like the forms of cars from the 60’s and 70’s, Bubbletop, Squarebody, Fastback and Wide-track Pontiacs. Way more interesting than today's cars that look like sneaker designers drew them up.
My memory is full of car images: my Dad sitting in his 63 Olds in the driveway listening to jazz keeping time with his ring on the horn rim; blasting down the Mass Pike in my brother's Saab in a snowstorm; countless rides hitchhiking cross country chasing foggy dharma. Ross Converse. my mechanic friend at 85 Park Street in Portland, lending me vehicles: A Divco step van, a 66 Morris mini station wagon, a 68 BMW 2002 (best car I've ever driven). Cars, like paintings, are projects that are always ongoing and need attention. Bring me that Buick Elecktra from the back of the studio. Huh, now I see that yellow is all wrong. Can’t believe it took me so long to see that! The studio is like a mechanics garage yard.
In the 90’s in NYC, I could get sculptures shown but no one would look at the paintings. I thought… well it's like selling used cars! I was fashioning sculptures out of metal and sometimes from car parts that littered the streets. The streets also were full of old beater cars ripe for subject matter. Cadillacs, Dodge Darts, Valiants, Ford Granadas and the occasional Gremlin. Cars were often abandoned or dumped in my post-industrial neighborhood in South Williamsburg. Polaroid land camera with installation film helped the hunt. I’m still on the lookout with internet car sites, the online marketplace, and sometimes TV offering subject matter.
Where the car appears is also important to the paintings: New Mexico, Western New York state and Maine are all places I visit frequently. Sometimes it's just a paint space. Sometimes the car is the landscape. An Appaloosa car can look in parts like a Rothko...that thrills me. The cars are moving away from the past and towards uncertainty. They echo my figure paintings in this regard. We are always moving through things. Some cars are finished, some are abandoned, some are tributes to lost friends.
Matt Blackwell’s vision of America is inspired. He works within a variety methods, at times raw and spontaneous, and at others analytical, but always delivered with driving authority and a touch of absurdity. Rather than reflecting a forlorn and nostalgic condition, his participants are depicted as free spirits who not only persevere but often prevail. His highly expressive and lavishly imaginative paintings are infused with irreverent humor, their cheerfulness often offset by dark elements lurking in the background, such as a skull or a devilish figure. Some of the works have an uncanny, fairy-tale quality.
Matt Blackwell holds a BFA from the Portland School of Art in 1977. In 1980, he studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received his MFA from the University of North Carolina in 1988. In 2006, Blackwell was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’s Purchase Award. In 2013, he was selected to participate in Piece Work, Maine the Biennial Exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art., after which, his sculpture was purchased by the museum. In 2015, he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
