Matthew Joseph Peak – Modern Renaissance
Experience the art of Matthew Joseph Peak in the stunning 4th issue of Model Society Magazine.
Blending Emotions, Abstractions and Reality
The reason I make art is that I just can’t help myself. I feel things deeply and art is my way to express and communicate what I feel, even if just to myself. There is so much inspiration that I get from life, and not only from what I see, but also from sensations, sounds and music. My guiding inspiration can sometimes be the touch of a light breeze on my skin, or the total silence and freedom of gliding underwater, or the feeling I get from a particular piece of music.
There is also an engaging challenge for me in blending emotions and abstractions with reality. The feel, form and sensuality of a subject may be based in reality, while the vision and mood may be entirely from imagination, so that the final art is unlike anything that really exists.
In fact, this freedom to blend reality and imagination, is one of the main reasons why I paint and draw. I’m not confined to creating images of scenes or people that actually exist in front of me. When I’m painting, I’m essentially creating visions of characters, landscapes, emotions and ideas with nothing more than my hands and paint, that is basically colored dirt. I can use references such as photos, movies or life, that help me understand what something looks like, but the final vision I render is an entirely new creation.
Support a refreshing vision of human beauty
Many people never experience just how much depth and meaning artwork can truly express.
Visit any museum where you’ll see paintings by some of the greatest artists of all time. You’ll see people stop for a few seconds, take a snapshot and move on. Meanwhile, many of these great works of art took more than a year to complete. I want to create images that you don’t want to look away from, images that compel the viewer to be truly moved and impacted. I want people to experience some of the appreciation and wonder in relationship with my artwork.
To a great extent, that’s why I create images of the human figure. As a traditional artist, the act of bringing a person to life on what was a blank canvas, is one of the most magical, wonderful and difficult things in the world. There are so many aspects to representing the human form in art. The volume, weight, softness, harness, fluidity, structure, anatomy, and emotion of a figure must all be expressed with combinations of dark, light and color. All these things come together as a representation of a living person and what they are doing, feeling and experiencing in their life.
Art has literally ‘opened my eyes and heart’, studying vision on a deep level has revealed aspects of life most people never even notice. I think if understanding art was a much larger part of education we would have a better world. Beauty in art is captivating, uplifting, and inspiring, and it comes in many forms. When we know how to see, we can find beauty in dance, rhythm, flowing water, hair, nature and figures. We can see it in the clouds, water, sand, grass, rivers, woods and natural bodies. It’s a gift to be able to see beauty in the soft and delicate relation between hair and skin, to see beauty in the way light falls into shadow around a form, to notice how otherwise invisible light is revealed by the dust and moisture in air.
See more from Matthew Joseph Peak in the stunning 4th issue of Model Society Magazine
