I grew up on a rural Ohio farm, immersed in the beauty of plants and the creative energy of nature. Even in high school I found myself displaying creative talent and artistic aptitude, winning a statewide student art competition with "Indian Princess," a mixed media collage with handmade paper and copper. The piece hung in the Ohio Governor's Mansion for one year. You can see a photograph of this piece, (though it does not show it particularly well) elsewhere on this site. Because family and friends insisted that fine art could not be a "career," I majored in Horticulture and Landscape Design at The Ohio State University, maintaining in that way my connection to the natural world that I loved and the energies that sustained me. Moving to Atlanta after college and working with some of the top landscape companies in the South I developed a keen intuition for composition and texture.
After more than 20 years designing in three dimensions, with nature as my canvas, I have finally shifted my attention from design to my original and deepest calling, Fine Art. Working first primarily in collage, monoprinting, mixed media, and acrylic painting, more recently I have been finding my ability to express myself deepened by working in oils. While my first love is abstraction, because of its ability to allow for multiple interpretations and evoke unique and personal emotions, I have surprised myself recently by exploring more representational work, specifically self-portraits. Regardless of genre, however, there are certain questions and tensions that underlie my work and give rise to whatever is uniquely personal to my voice as an artist. There is always a recognition that life is an expression of the play of natural energies and realities that are operating and existing just beyond normal every day sensory awareness. There is the dance and the tension between foreground and background, which represents to me not only the duality of the relative reality we live in but the ambiguity inherent in our different individual perceptions of it. And there is always a desire to invoke emotion and engagement, connecting with the viewer through color, through movement, through symbolism, through beauty, and through self-discovery, leading ultimately to transcendence and healing.
I have shown at several juried Atlanta Art Fairs, including twice at Callanwolde Art Center, as well as having shown my hand-made paper collages at a couple of pop-up shows and in 2016 at the Smyrna, GA Public Library, where, at the end of 2017, a selection of my paintings and monoprints were featured in the main upstairs gallery as a solo exhibition entitled “Evolution.” In September 2018, I was the featured artist at the “Arts Fest” sponsored by the East Lake Y, where I showed paintings, mono prints, and collages. I was honored to have two overlapping solo shows in early 2020, before the Covid crisis hit: “Forked Tongues, Thumbprints, and Floral Abstractions” at the Decatur Arts Alliance Gallery, and “ImPrint: Body Energy In and On Paper” at Art-Haus Gallery in Grant Park. I have pieces in private collections in Los Angeles, Houston, Austin, Atlanta, Washington, DC., and New York City.
I am thrilled to accept the challenge to create for a living and I welcome your inquiries and your feedback.
Pushups Arts Studio 301
1805 Harvard Ave.
College Park GA 30337
matthewablodgett@gmail.com
+1 770-596-4582