Carp Matthew is a visual artist predominately working with oils. He is known for his dark, visceral and grotesque style featuring mutated lost characters, full of longing, despair and banality. Continually roving between subject and observer, Matthew’s visualizations are at once the artists’ own nihilistic and dark observations of contemporary society with all of its pitfalls as well as the artists’ own longing to understand and assimilate into the world around him. His abstract figures are often depicted in empty rooms or carrying out mundane and everyday tasks, whilst their true nature or feelings are revealed through mutated expressions or physical manifestations.
Often working with oils or acrylics using block background colours to highlight his abstract and distorted figures. Matthew has exhibited throughout Britain and has recently started to cement himself within the international art fair circuit.
He has been described as one of the most exciting, emerging figurative painters on the rise. “Carp Matthew’s brutally honest works are a welcomed breath of fresh air for the art world, a truly unique visionary with supercharged raw talent”
Self-taught or art school?
I studied graphic design after secondary school on the advice of teachers (“it’s like art but you’ll get a job”), but I never really enjoyed it (it’s not like art at all) and found being restricted to briefs really frustrating. After a couple of years, I took a job in a bookies and used any free time I had to paint with the hope I’d be able to go full time eventually. I’ve had no fine art training.
f you could own one work of art what would it be?
Francis Bacon’s ‘Three Studies For Figures At The Base Of A Crucifixion’ is by a long way the most overwhelmingly abrasive painting I’ve ever seen in the flesh. There’s no point in me trying to explain it. If I owned it my wife would only make me bury it anyway.
How would you describe your style?
I tend to work in several different styles, switching between them randomly or perhaps depending on how much free time I have/ what materials I can afford/ what subject matter I’m currently interested in. If there’s a style running throughout it’s probably something along the lines of ‘brain-damaged chimpanzee locked in a crayon factory’. Because I’ve never had any training I’ve always had to do a lot of improvising.
Can you tell us about your artistic process?
90% of my finished paintings start with a random photograph. I used to clip them from newspapers but now mostly just collect any images I see online that I find interesting. I’ll dig out a few from however many thousands I have stored up that I think might make a comprehensively horrible picture and try to cobble something together in photoshop until it looks right. Then I’ll print it off and work from that, manipulating/ adding/ subtracting as I paint. Most drawings I do are off the top of my head as almost all of them were done on my lunch breaks at day jobs.
Is narrative important within your work?
I quite enjoy people trying to find narrative in my work and try to encourage it by including lots of recognisable imagery and symbols, but honestly, I don’t see any sense in the world around me and this what I’m trying to get at in most of my work; that unstoppable drive we collectively possess to try and drag meaning out of every movement even when it’s clearly futile or just totally ludicrous. My work is full of dead-ends and decoys but you’ll never find any sense in it. None that I’m aware of anyway. I’m trying to rid myself of the need to find that meaning because I don’t feel there is any. I know it’s pointless but I still do it. We all do, I think. See? There’s not even any sense in this stupid paragraph.
Who are your favourite artists and why?
Predictably I sense, I admire no artist’s work so much as that of Francis Bacon and it was a random meeting with a small book of his work before I’d ever heard of him that really made up my mind that I would try to spend as much of my life as a possible painting. Even the best artists have generally always tried to romanticise or shoehorn meaning into their subject matter either through vanity or for the sake of their own or the viewer’s comfort. But Bacon, I think anyway, always seems to have looked reality square in the eye and made an honest attempt to deal with it no matter how painful that proved, and I’ve always thought that to be incredibly brave and rare and admirable.
I can also show his work to my mom and say ‘See? I’m not the most miserable shit that ever lived.’
What or who inspires your art?
I am of course often inspired by the output and efforts of many other artists working today. It’s very easy to tell when somebody has something they really really want to say with art and it’s infectious. As someone who tends to work quite quickly on several things at once and has an attention span of around 12 seconds (max), I also hugely admire artists that spend really long periods of time planning, organising and making their work whether this be a medieval altarpiece or wrapping a bastard damn, it’s always very impressive to me even if I’m not hugely interested in the meaning.
Other than art I just try to drag inspiration out of my everyday surroundings; tv news, concrete, grey sky, the creatures that infest high street bookies, melting politicians, sentient pizzas, etc.
Where’s your studio and what’s it like?
My studio is a glorified shed we had to have built at the end of the garden a couple of years ago because the paint fumes seeping out of the spare bedroom were making us see things. It’s very small and I struggle to maintain any order in there but I very much like it and it’s the only purpose-built studio I’ve ever had. It has trees around it and is generally quite peaceful.
Do you have any studio rituals?
I don’t really have any ‘rituals’ regarding my studio. I take a mug of tea and a little speaker with me so I can listen to horrible music or awful news while I paint. I often take a biscuit for the squirrels. Then it’s just a case of trying to kick enough junk out of the way to make a space to hang a canvas and off I go.
What are you working on currently?
I’m currently working on a series “Figure in a bed” which I would like to develop into a larger scale.
Where can we buy your art?
https://www.shop-leontiagallery.com/collections/carp-matthew
