Artist Profile - Matt Sayers
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Biography
Matt is 35 years old, and lives with his wife Ann and dog Rosie in Staffordshire.
Artist Statement
My love for art came from watching my Dad draw pictures for
me as a boy. I remember thinking how good it would be to see something I liked
and to be able to draw it so in the future I could remember what it looked like
then. Little did I know at the time just how important that would be, not just
for me but to many other people too as the familiar sights they grew up with
gradually disappeared forever.
During my school years, art was the only subject I was
really interested in and are probably the only lessons I can still remember
like they happened yesterday. I spent much of my childhood in Plymouth where I
understood early on about strong community spirit, I was lucky to move to
Cannock in Staffordshire at the age of 14 where that sense of community still
held. My formative years were therefore spent in the old mining town, at a time
of great emotion in the last days of the mines.
I love to paint as much as possible, when I see something
interesting on my travels I can't wait to jump straight into my small studio
'the old coal shed' early the next morning, and paint until my wife tells me
lights out.
My original influence were the works of LS Lowry, as I felt
I understood his own inspirations and often imagined myself as one of the
characters in his paintings. In the last
10 years my love of old cars & buses, terraced houses, smokey chimney tops
and the hard working people who make up the character rich streets of working class Britain have become
the inspirations behind my own collections. Where the buildings or objects
recalled by those people are long gone, I research my paintings thoroughly
using old images contained in books from local libraries.
I like to listen to music during the painting stage
something acoustic at the start to keep things calm and peaceful and then a
varied mix during the whole process. I have a basic technique which starts by
covering the entire canvas with paint to get rid of the white, and depending
upon the mood I want to create I add in a few clouds followed by a faint
horizon which I then play with to get the right atomshpere for the image I have
in my head. After a 'cup of coffee head break' I then layout on the canvas my
current street scene up to the point where I am happy to leave the painting
till the next day. I tend to find myself back in the studio before the nights
out reviewing the days work and letting my ever supportive wife cast her eye
over the piece, whom provides a few observations and thoughts which can
sometimes spark a new angle to the finished piece.
Once I have completed the piece, I walk away from it for a
few days and then return to cast my refreshed eyes over it, imagining myself
standing in that scene so I can add or amend anything that's not quite right or
infact 'missing’.