Matt Cipov Creatures of the Deep at 323 East Jan 30th

Despite his opening for “Creatures of the Deep” at 323 East just days away Matt Cipov found time to talk with us about his art, process and life.

You have spent your entire life in Milwaukee, do you think that being from the Midwest has affected your art and how it has developed? Do you think that your work would be different had you been raised in another part of the country?

I can only speak for myself and several other artists I know, but the more devoted you are to making art, the more you live in a bubble. I consider myself something of a hermit. Sure, I enjoy free time and time away from art, but I really like to focus on work and because of that, I am often at home, in my office.

Milwaukee is probably going to be my home base for the rest of my life. I really like it here and I like being close to my family. But I really do not think uprooting myself would drastically change how I work, or what I work on.

If anything, the harsh winters that we get in the Midwest can directly influence my work. In colder times, I tend to get a stiff, painful right wrist, which makes it a bit harder to make at. In fact, it used to slow the process down to nearly no art for a few months at a time.

Thankfully, I have been pushing myself to work through it and enjoy drawing even in these frigid times. I think I have had the most fruitful November, December and January of my entire art career and that makes me quite happy.

Would you describe the process for creating a painting? Do you sketch prior to starting work on a piece or is a piece done spontaneously?

The backbone of my CREATURES OF THE DEEP show at 323 EAST might be a bit of an exception to the way I prefer to work, but more often than not when I make art, I prefer to to do as little prep and planning as possible allowing me to get to the creation of final art as quickly as possible. It seems like the more planning, sketching and second guessing I do when I make art, the less life and spontaneity I end up putting into what I am working on.

At the beginning of 2009 when I started thinking about the CREATURES OF THE DEEP series, I decided it would be fun to attempt a combination of all the ways I like to work: a mixture of hand drawn art, cut paper, and hand stamping with a layer of grime and grunge to seal things up. And it also gave me a chance to get as close to print making as I will likely ever get. By making black and white reproductions of my line art, mangling, ripping and tearing them up only to reassemble them, tint them and make them look like some beat up drawing found in an excavation. And this art is combined with collage elements and hand stamped backgrounds. Each time I do it, it always turns out differently. If I want to do it more clean and calm, I can. If I prefer a more chaotic, dirty feel, I can go for that too.

And because of this, I still retain a lot of the spontaneity I fuel my art with. Knowing that at any moment I could wreck, or over work something I am working on carries quite a thrill and makes me challenge myself every time I work. By diving right into final art, it keeps me from over planning something.

One of my favorite aspects of your art is that you often use hand stamping and collage in the production of a piece. What is the significance of using the collage and stamps to your art?

I tend to make very sparse art. My compositions are lean and very much to the point and I have always been a fan of giving a viewer equal parts intricate detail and simplicity in hopes that the empty spaces in my art draws even more attention to the detail heavy parts.

The hand stamping I do sort of completes a lot of my compositions. It gives me a chance to fill corners and alter the flow of a drawing while being a defined element that feels very different from the line art. My hand written text treatments are meant to work in a very similar way. Little thoughts, or random words come to me and I put them into the drawings without too much critical thought. I reserve those thoughts for how and where I want to incorporate the words into the art. Very often I do not question the meaning of what I am adding to my drawings, but I do make sure I like the flow and placement of it. I have sometimes nearly ruined a piece of art with a poorly place stamp hit, or piece of text.

As for the cut paper and collage elements I sometimes add to things, I have a huge collection of paper waiting to be used in projects. Any time I see some paper with a strange pattern on it, or something I could see as a fun background for a piece of art, I buy it knowing that some day it will probably end up being used for art. In fact, some of the paper elements I’ve added to drawings in my 323 EAST show have been waiting around for years… waiting for the right piece of art to be stuck upon. The sad part is that once I run out of some of the elements I use, I know I’ll never find the same paper again.

The title of the show at 323 East is “Creatures of the Deep.” How did you arrive at this title, and is there an underlying theme to all of the works for this show? Also, how much of the artwork was made specifically for this show at 323 East?

Monsters and ghouls tend to pop up in every avenue of art I work in. And beyond zombies and beasts, I give a lot of love to fringe animals like: piranhas, jellyfish, sloths, cobras and all sorts of strange birds. For me (a person with tons of animal allergies,) making art like this is sort of my way of venturing into the deep, deep wilderness around the world. I might not ever set the chance to draw a Yeti in person, not just because I would likely sneeze my ass off, but because it is pretty much an impossibility. Regardless, I can pretend that it could happen from the comfort of my home, drawing all sorts of animals and made up monsters in the hopes that it comes together like some sort of strange set of field studies I made on a huge expedition that took me to all reaches of the globe.

The batch of art for my 323 EAST show was prepped specifically for them. While the show is something of an overview of my favorite themes of art I like to work on (IE: masks, monsters and animals) I put a lot of consideration into what would be included. As of right now, I am not sure what everything is going to look like hung up on the gallery walls, but I am quite sure it will all go well together. And I will finally have the chance to put up what I consider my complete collection of animal mask art I’ve been working on over the years. It is going to be a big installation… a wall of 80 mask drawings that I’ve been working on from early 2005 up to just the last few weeks. Including these 80 drawings, the batch of art I have prepared for 323 EAST totals in at 150.

I feel very lucky to have a show at 323 and I wanted to make the show as big as possible.

Aside from the show at 323 East is there anything else in the near future that you would like to tell us about?

The Berlin fashion magazine INDIE has asked me to contribute a few pages to an up coming issue. Also, I am doing some work for Sveriges Radio which is pretty much the NPR of Sweden. I can’t wait to get started on that project. I’ve also been signed on to handle a bunch of art duties for the super excellent musical groups WEST INDIAN GIRL and ENTROPY ENSEMBLE. And I have a few more art shows lined up for 2010 already. In May I have a show in the Milwaukee area and another show in Chicago. And there have been some rumblings that I might have a solo art show coming up somewhere in Italy later this year. A lot of fun stuff is coming up.

“Creatures of the Deep” runs from Jan 30th until February 25th. The opening reception is this Saturday at 6pm.

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3 Comments on “Matt Cipov Creatures of the Deep at 323 East Jan 30th”

• Kimberly
  

  Shoot! If I didn’t live several states away I would love to go to this show. Big fan of Matt’s work. There’s this great balance of absurd illustrations and sporadic typography that I’m drawn to.

  01-29-10 » 5:35 PM »

• amy
  

  terrific interview. I love this guy. when I lived in milwaukee and worked for a magazine, I commissioned some cover art from him. he was amazing to work with, his cover art was my favorite cover art, and the issue it appeared on was my favorite issue.

  can’t wait to see this show!

  01-29-10 » 8:25 PM »

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  [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by amy elliott, dwellephant and 323East Art and More, Perfect Laughter. Perfect Laughter said: Interview with Matt Cipov about his upcoming show @323East : http://bit.ly/c24Wnv [...]

  01-31-10 » 3:35 PM »

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