Background

Matthew Wood was born in Portland, Oregon. When he was seven the family moved to Southern California. Later, while on a swimming scholarship to The University of Iowa, he studied painting, photography, and drawing and fell under the influence of the art of Mauricio Lasansky. Matthew Wood continued his education with a full scholarship to the prestigious  Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Both before and after his studies at Art Center, Matthew Wood traveled the United States living out of his 1979 Chevrolet Caprice. During those years, he would take pictures,create artist books, and periodically bury stacks of works beside the roads and highways.

For the most part, however, these became trips of conscience, attempts to document a world that was vanishing.
His work contains both riotous celebration and deep nostalgia. Are we seeing nature’s decay or the vision of an artist capturing a fleeting moment. Matthew Wood’s work contains thick massing of pigments and raw canvas. he seems to obliterate anything that ultimately does not belong to the essential nature of the piece. He will edit in any way possible, by sanding, repainting, burning, chemical immersion, burying, et al. Matthew Wood appears to push nature out of the way to create his own universe through a literal topography on the canvas.

“Art is the opposite of nature. I do not paint from nature, but take from its bountiful platter”       Edvard Munch

Matthew Wood’s roots are Polish and Russian. This seems providential, because in 1992 he met and married Joanna Gamaj Czaderna. Originally from Krakow, Poland, she has been in the States for twenty-five years. Joanna’s visceral devotion to Poland and its people and cultural heritage has awoken in Matthew Wood a desire to explore the land of his ancestors. With their daughter Bianca, the family spends one to two months a year in Poland.

Matthew Wood’s art is the product of great torment. The result is a sublime beauty and a celebration of the mystery that lies ahead.

Murals site: internationalpalettes.com