The Arts & Business Council, Blackbird Media, and F&M Bank have teamed up to present the Artist of the Week on The Nashville Sign. This week’s featured artist is Matthew Christy!
Matthew Christy is a painter and writer who uses an oil pastel transfer process that allows him to combine images to create abstract patterns that challenge the mind to see more. He draws upon his experiences with Pareidolia, the tendency for humans to see images in abstract patterns in, for example, wood grain, cloud formations, and burnt toast. He explains that in his drawings he tries folding images into one inextricable, tenuous web. It allows him to combine images so that the under image is revealed slowly by the drawing on top.
“If you slice open a tree, what you find is a slow moving liquid, knotting and swirling. It’s true of stone too. Liquidity, flow, fluidity, that seems to get close to experience for me. Not phenomenologically, but to things as they are. They slip through fingers: relationships, money, family, friends. That’s one reason I draw. It combines my hand with my eye in the process of revealing something to myself about myself. And for a second It feels like it’s mine.”
Matt grew up in Franklin and moved back to Tennessee after completing an MFA from the University of Oregon in 2015. Currently an artist with Nashville’s Red Arrow Gallery, Matt has shown locally at Seed Space, Mild Climate, and the David Lusk Gallery. Nationally, he has shown at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Oregon and internationally at the Mienblau Gallery in Berlin.
Matt writes about art, publishing Number Magazine based out of Memphis and in national publications like Art Papers. He lives in Nashville and teaches art at TSU and Watkins College.
To see more of Matthew Christy’s portfolio, visit https://www.theredarrowgallery.com/artist/matt-christy or follow him on instagram @mwchristy.
Want to be featured on The Nashville Sign? Visual artists working in any medium, who are members* of the Arts & Business Council at the Basic Level ($30 annually) or above, are eligible to apply for Artist of the Week on The Nashville Sign.
*Those unable to become members due to financial barriers can be granted a waiver. Contact us at info@abcnashville.org to be confidentially considered for a waiver.