Secret Hideout: the Art of Matt Gordon
The frolicking skeleton children, bat-human creatures, and a lizard girl named Claudine embody the wild imagination of Matt Gordon, a mixed-media artist based in Plymouth, Michigan. These acrylic paintings and graphite drawings continue to build a strange world and narrative in the works since the late 1990s. Flourishes of pop culture are scattered throughout the works: a Spock action figure tucked into a character’s purse, a feline girl in a Wonder Woman costume, or a stray Xbox game. These scenes come to the artist in differing ways.
“Sometimes I get that quick ah-ha flash of a moment in my head, where a scene is frozen and available for me to observe in full detail,” Gordon says, “and it’s perfect to me and either drawing it or painting it is effortless. But most of the time, I kickstart the image by drawing a foot or a wheel. And the axis they’re on dictates the perspective and the motion that is going to happen.”
Gordon answers these questions from his studio, where he says he spends most of his life alone, with most interactions between him and the squirrels he feeds and a cat that sits in his lap as he works. (The artist notes that Richard, one of the squirrels he feeds, is blind in one eye and moves like a “drunk king cobra” when he’s eating peanuts. “That shit cracks me up,” he adds.) Between crafting these hyperdetailed parties of mingling, morbid characters, Gordon picks mushrooms, mountainbikes, and hikes the woodland area near his home.
A sense of place has always been important to the artist. His studios have always provided inspiration in how these fictional get-togethers are formed. “My last studio of fifteen years was built in 1852, and there is a harness racing horse track down the hill and in full view when you look out the south-facing windows,” Gordon recalls. “The town had a track-folk vibe that birthed many characters. But the skeletons were a direct reaction to what I guess I’ll call a ghost or spirit. Not all time but many times while I would be painting, I would feel a presence behind me and the hairs on the nape of my neck would rise and there would be heavy pressure on my left shoulder. I’m left-handed. [It was] like someone was resting their hand on my shoulder and watching me paint. My father had just passed away, so I imagined it as him for the most part. I started putting skeletons in my painting to celebrate my invisible studio friends.”
He’s moved spots since, but the skeletons remain. “My new studio, while even older a building, has not had any ghosts,” he adds. “And the skeletons now are pretty much how I explore anatomy poses and how fabric rests on the body. They skeletons. They are the backbone. They are my most basic visual tool, but the most useful.”
Yet, the artist’s fascination with backdrops goes back much further than his studio tenures. Gordon was born in 1974, living just down the street from his cousins in Michigan. He remembers kids everywhere in that neighborhood, and says he probably played in each of the yards on his block growing up. He recalls this time as “the most amazing childhood. And the colors he remembers from the 1970s remains his go-to palette, and “those memories and remembered visuals are what keep me inspired now.” Gordon attended the Columbus College of Art and Design in the early 1990s before moving to the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit. Eventually, he became part of the RVCA Artist Network program, for which he’s designed apparel and installations. At his desk, depending on the medium, different emotions arise from creating. “Drawing is pure bliss to me,” Gordon says. “My acrylic paintings can be a struggle, as I know I can paint over and over them until I’ll get it right. Most paintings, I have painted each figure up to six times. The paintings are treated like a curio cabinet, and the drawings are posters to me.”
I started putting skeletons in my painting to celebrate my invisible studio friends.”
Gordon is planning a storybook (“or many”) out of these pieces. The first will be titled Mushroom Club. He’s says that the book won’t recount the backstory of these characters. He’d rather just tell new fun stories. He says that social media has given the artist a new reason to forge ahead on the book and creating new pieces. “My paintings tend to be clusterfucks, as I want to put all of this information in there as no one would see them until they were finished,” Gordon says. “Now with Instagram, I can share images right away, and that relieves me a little bit of my geek and I have really learned how to edit my work.”
Still, some of his favorite interactions are the ones that happen in person. “The most common reaction is that it reminds them of storybooks from their youth and makes them happy,” he says. “I enjoy when people get to see my paintings in real life, and they think it’s a collage or computer-generated image. I get great pride from that.”
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 43, which is sold out. Get our latest print issue while supporting our independent coverage of new Contemporary Art from all around the world by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.
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