Matt Thomas

Sunset Mission

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“I use painting as a means of introspection, reflection and discovery. I’m interested in the psychological aspects of painting, and how it relates to the viewers’ body and mind through its scale, symmetry, colour and form. I like to draw connections between images I see in film and animation to historical and contemporary paintings, which I then reinterpret into my own work. For this series, I’m using landscape, specifically the woods, to symbolize the psychology of navigating a path through life. Forests have been symbolized as both protective and full of danger. Full of life, resources and sanctuary, but also danger, evil and the unknown. I want the woods to act as interior spaces, reflecting a generationally shared psychological state of simultaneous hope for prosperity, and foreboding doom. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep” is a quote from a Robert Frost poem that describes a moment at dusk where the writer stops on his path through the woods, struck by the beautiful melancholia of the “darkest evening of the year”. It’s here that I want to position the viewer, looking in to the beautiful, terrifying, unknown of the woods, the mind, and their own path that lies ahead.”