Being a painter means many different things to me. My paintings are essentially an algorithm to understanding my creativity, my lens to the world and my ego in a different light. I seldom am able to do two paintings in the same style or using the same composition. When I do a painting it is about capturing an image and/or mood and deciding how to approach it from the start. There is a constant process of deciding how to approach the next color, next texture, next line or next shape to best capture what is in my thoughts. Sometimes the medium and process circumvents where I want to go and find myself in a totally different place. The final product is always about discovery about what I see, what I have created and who I am. Each completed work feels like a stepping stone to the next.
As a child growing up I always gravitated toward being creative and drawing and painting. My early childhood I grew up in Chicago, where my parents had several artist friends who would encourage my youthful passion for art. When I was 9 there was a significant change in my life as my father decided to leave the business world of Chicago and become a dairy farmer in rural central Wisconsin. Instead of an alleyway out my backdoor, I had acres and acres of natural wildlife that seemed to call for me to explore and learn. I continued to create but I found my new natural world creeping into my creations. I would discover new images, patterns and textures that I wanted to emulate. In the 7th grade I created my masterpiece to date, a beautiful whitetail deer. Many were impressed with the image I had created, except for one thing. “Why Mati did you color the deer green?” asked my classmates and teachers with a snicker. I would learn several years later I was profoundly colorblind, red, green, and brown. For most of the next 40 years I set aside any youthful artist ambitions to pursue art with a fear of the color green… or red or brown. I saw colors, but they didn’t necessarily translate to what other saw. Over the next 40 years there was a constant recognition of images and compositions I wanted to create and how I might create them, yet a dismissal of creating them in fear of creating the colors and images I saw and others might not.
While living on Washington Island Wisconsin, an artist neighbor and close friend encouraged me to try painting again. With some sense of trepidation, I used blue, black and white pastels for my first landscape pieces. Soon I slowly reached out with other pastels colors and experimented with more abstract landscape paintings to capture different moods I felt about the image. I also found myself drawn to a number different ways to compose and paint nature to capture new perspectives. I then started to use acrylics for the first time. I found brushes cumbersome and awkward and quickly experimented using broad knives and stimples to lay down colors and create different textures. I found I was constantly experimenting with each piece using different colors, different techniques and different compositions. I find it very interesting that each piece attracts the attention of different viewers with varying responses for different reasons.
My inspiration comes from a mixture of what I conceptionally sees inside myself when I see the world outside myself. 40 years of seeing images and feeling moods that I wanted to paint has provide me with a wonderful backlog of ideas, as well as, finding new images from continuing life experiences. The majority of my inspiration comes seeing textures and patterns that nature reveals and deciding why I value it. Sometimes that may extend itself to “big city” when I occasionally visit. When the painting lends itself, I enjoy using bright colors. Composition is King and process is its servant. I am a painter.
Metsa Studio 