Matt McMullen

Matthew McMullen is originally for the front range of Colorado.  From an early age exploring the mountains, lakes, and planes of Colorado, theses landscapes would inevitably affect his artistic work. McMullen began painting at an early age urged on by his great grandfather and grandmother who were both commercial artists and painters.  He would later go on to MSU Denver and receive his Bachelors of Fine Art in Painting. After finishing this degree, McMullen decided to explore the California landscape and further is education receiving his Masters of Fine Art in Painting at the Laguna College of Art and Design. In this program he learned valuable technical skill to push in conceptual ideas further and more direct.  After his master’s program is where McMullen’s work would start to take shape working with figures and landscapes and the connection between the two subjects. Through is art education he gained an appreciation for all types of painting movements from realism to abstraction. Being influenced by Rembrandt, Rene Magritte, Wayne Thiebaud, David Caspar Friedrich and Richard Diebenkorn, McMullen tried to incorporate all of these styles of painting into a cohesive artwork. McMullen is currently living and working out of Southern California. When he is not painting, he is running on the beach trail in San Clemente or taking snowboarding trips back home to Colorado.

Matthew McMullen’s paintings, deal with the here and now. Even though life is hectically spiraling onward, he tries to capture the moments when you can rest in the present. With the use of figure and landscape McMullen explores what it’s like to drift away from our current reality and get lost in our deeper selves, as the mindless quality of total involvement that comes only when the ego is quiet and there is no attachment. In these paintings, McMullen depict this flow with the landscape elements that circle around and through his figures. He displays how the body is overtaken, as if you are physically fading away and becoming a part of the landscape that surrounds us. Creating dream like scenes that question reality, McMullen brings the viewer into his reality, transporting the viewer into his world where possibilities are endless. These paintings show how every person can change their current reality into something more transcendental and boundless than once thought possible. He takes the viewer on a journey from the physical to the non-physical, exploring different physical existences in the picture plane. These realities are expressed with different styles of painting working together in a harmonious way. Moving from realism, to surrealism, into abstraction, McMullen’s work shows how change happens inside, and that correlates with the landscapes that surround us. We all have the self-power to change and affect our environment.