Happy 2025! May the new year bring you inspiration and purpose! (01/04/2025)
- Matthew Plaza
- Apr 13
- 2 min read
This year ended for me with a new focus on painting the human form and capturing the nature of life through human experience and psychological states. I carried my focus on light, color, and texture into a new context dealing with creating atmospheric depth, dimensionality, and capturing an expressive energy of human states. My latest work (above) is titled The woman in the red room.
My next focus will be on combining the portrait style complexity I’ve achieved with a more dynamic scene and sense of perspective.
This male portrait, called Augusta, foreshadows my upcoming desire to explore landscapes and scenic perspective in combination with human subjects. It was not originally intentional, but the abstracted landscape behind his figure reminds me of the scenes and landscapes I see in an around Jerome and Sedona, Arizona, which seem to have crept into my internal vision.
I am also rethinking my ongoing question and dilemma, the battle between expressionism, which uses various distortions to create an effect on the viewer, vs. idealism, which was championed by renaissance artists who wanted to depict humanity in an idealized and perfected manner.
My watercolor painting A portrait of Ingrid Bergman obviously does not strive for hyper-realism. The watermarks of the medium are visible but the work also conveys a sense not unlike that of classical marble sculptures. That said, the proportions are accurate. I want to depict a whitewashed marble façade of a bygone era, portraying the nostalgia of big screen, film-star idyllic beauty.
Am I finding a balance between depicting existence through humanity in a way that relies on beauty and the ideal, while using creative imperfections in each medium to convey an expressive element to the viewer?
The renaissance masters believed nature, the universe, and all of creation expressed itself in humanity.
Male dancer leaping demonstrates my journey through a multitude of figurative media types. I’ve added graphite, charcoal, oil pastel, and watercolor to my list of tools in the last few months! While this explosion of possibilities has made it challenging to find consistency within my work, as I move forward, I feel that the experience, challenges, and character of each of these is contributing to my overall aesthetic development.
I have been working extensively on perfecting my understanding of the proportions of the human body. Temptation combines this anatomical pursuit with the psychological and religious exploration of our human nature.
The human form is the ultimate challenge of the artist; conveying accurate proportions in space and the realistic sense of weight and fluidity of form is paramount.
Stay tuned… |
I will be revealing more about my projects, both old and new! I look forward to sharing the story behind my work and creative explorations. |
Yours truly, |
Matthew Plaza |
Copyright (C) 2024 Matthew Plaza. All rights reserved.
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