How It All Started (11/30/24)
- Matthew Plaza
- Apr 13
- 3 min read
A journey from collecting art to painting to drawing… This month marks the 9th month on my journey as a full-time artist. My journey has taken me from abstract painting, to digital art, to pencil on paper, and back to digital multimedia and beyond. As the end of the year approaches, I look forward to combining the creative avenues and mediums that I have explored and working toward a fluidity in my style which transcends medium. I am so excited to share my journey with all of you that support my work and I truly cannot thank you enough for your continued encouragement. —Matthew Plaza  Influence from the abstract expressionists. A love affair with Frank Stella’s Getty Tomb and Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Nets.The header says it all. My first series of over 30 paintings illustrates the love affair I had with ideas first explored in a small series by Frank Stella. The most notable of his abstract minimalist works is his large Getty Tomb. In my series, I took his ideas further and technically changed them. Subconsciously I was exploring dimensionality. Stella passed away this summer and his line paintings remain only a tiny part of his life’s work. Yayoi Kusama was the first abstract expressionist whose work actually had a profound emotional impact on me. Together these two painters unlocked an inner world within me I had never explored. It was time to begin experimenting with materials. I was going to need paint and tape. Lots of tape.  The voyage into representational art started with my realization that everything is light and shadow. What is and what we perceive are not the same. The impressionists knew this all too well. From pencil on paper, I sometimes take my ideas and digitize them utilizing a technique that was inspired to me by the screen printing technique of Andy Warhol. In a similar way, I take digital images created by AI and collage them, underpainting them the way Warhol did in his famous celebrity portraits in which he used repurposed popular images. My works use filters to alter light coming from semi-transparent layers and offsets which add spatial dimensionality.  Combining the methods of under painting with drawing and digitizing, I also utilize digital effects and repetition similar to my line paintings, but this time using figures. The following is a my representation of Venus inspired by Cubist works, such as those by Picasso. It is also a subtle reference to ancient fertility idols such as the 30,000-year-old Venus de Willendorf. Her covering of her left breast is a reference to Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.  There will be a lot more…Stay in touch because I will be revealing more about my projects, both old and new! There will be more about how I am exploring light, color, and forgotten techniques of the past, including weird synchronicities and how I think art history is repeating… Click here to inquire about my work! Yours truly, Matthew Plaza Copyright (C) 2024 Matthew Plaza. All rights reserved. |
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