Artist Matt Aston was driving from Los Angeles to Texas the other week in a wide-assed pick-up truck with a half-dozen unfinished paintings (some as large as 6’ by 6’) lashed in the bed when he hit heavy tailwinds in the Mojave not far from Barstow. He could feel the wind pushing up the canvases but he figured as long as he kept driving fast, he’d be okay. But then he encountered some heavy traffic and was forced to slow down. Now he could really feel the wind tugging at the paintings, almost lifting the back of the truck. Ahead, he could see a dark smear across the sky—a sandstorm, a really big motherfucker, and now traffic was coming to a halt but the winds were picking up even more. Suddenly, he heard a ripping sound and, as he peered up through the windshield, he watched his paintings get sucked up into the sky, one by one.
A half mile or so ahead, Solvang baker Carl Birkholm was sitting tight in his new Cadillac with three friends (they were on their way to Laughlin for a few days of R and R), riding out the massive sandstorm that had just slammed down on the highway, reducing visibility to almost zero and bringing traffic to a halt.
“It looked like something out of the Wizard of Oz,” Birkholm said. “There was all kinds of stuff blowing around.” Suddenly a huge dark rectangle emerged from the maelstrom and hurtled into the windshield, shattering the safety glass with a terrifying crash.
Birkholm leapt out and pulled the thing out just as a few more of Matt Aston’s unfinished works came skittering down. Along with other besieged motorists, they grabbed the paintings and helped secure them to the ground by standing on them. “Not bad,” observed one critic as he hunched his shoulders against stinging blasts of hot sand. Aston, a big bear-like guy, ran up to discover what must be one of the strangest impromptu shows he had ever participated in. He secured what paintings he could, but the wind was so persistent he could only stamp on the frames to shatter the wood and fold up the ripped canvases to prevent them from sailing off and possibly damaging even more vehicles. He owes Birkholm a windshield, but if the baker is smart, he’ll take a painting in trade – Aston has about as much insurance as the average downtown Los Angeles artist. Plus, it’s a good bet that a Matt Aston painting will retain more value than a Cadillac windshield in a decade or so.
–Matt Aston is an artist riven by dichotomies: like Robert Rauschenberg, he was raised in a dry, Church of Christ fundamentalist small town in Texas that could have inspired the movie, Flashdance, but most of the year he lives in L.A., indulging in the amenities offered by the downtown arts scene. His acknowledged influences are Jackson Pollock and Chuck Close, two artists who couldn’t be more different; and his heroes include the giants of the Beat Generation (such as Terry Southern, whose portrait by Aston appears on the cover), cowboys and a dog named Buddy.
In many of his paintings, Aston has managed to fuse the disparate influences of Close and Pollock in unique works that draw upon the seemingly random dripped and strewn color studies of Pollock and the carefully constructed large-scale portraits of Close. From a distance, these portraits, usually composed on a large scale, are stunning likenesses – but a closer inspection reveals they are composed of deceptively random-appearing doodles of paint. His genius is clearly in reconciling a technique that seems unforced into a composition that is actually very carefully designed.
Writing in Flavorpill, Shana Nys Dambrot says “. . . Matt Aston occupies a rather singular place within the figurative genre. His portraits of anyone and everyone, from local indigents to his most affluent collectors, fulfill their function — they are recognizable and expressive. But Aston goes far beyond the conventions of realism, using a thick, gestural painting technique and florid color to create pieces with a dramatic formal quality related to abstract expressionism.” Collectors love his work and it is not often that a painting he has sold re-enters the market.
Aston is an exuberant guy who has an appetite for life that makes him stand out in a crowd. His startling take on social issues (he tends to see dark, subliminal forces gnawing at the national psyche), molded by his life experience in two very different and opposing American realities, bleeds into his art. In life, he is sometimes an unsettling character who does not suffer fools lightly and can unleash a biting wit, when necessary. Rick Robinson, another bearish, oversized Los Angeles artist, tells this story about Matt: “We were hanging out and having some drinks with some guy who was a fan of Matt’s work – but he was kinda annoying. At one point, he said, ‘I can’t believe I’m hanging out with Matt Aston and Rick Robinson.’ Aston gave the kid one of those really scary and cold Matt Aston looks and then he leaned over to me and said. ‘let’s eat him.’”
A student of stage design (he received an MFA from Southern Methodist University, which he attended on a full scholarship), his resume includes artwork executed for the award-winning Greenday videos, restoration work on the Egyptian Theater and the Lewis and Clark murals in the Ronald Reagan library – the latter an excellent example of the incongruities inherent in the work of a small-town Texan (Abilene was considered a “big city” in his tiny flyover townlet of origin) who reads William Burrough and lives with a woman named ‘Jett.’
Aston has executed a cycle of portraits he calls his “circle of men” paintings. He’s passionate about why he wants to celebrate them: “The paintings of guys who had lived in my time but were getting on in years . . . like Pollack, Barker and Kerouac and my friend Damon was aware of these paintings and he said, ‘hey, in celebration of Niles (Southern, Terry’s son) landing the New York Public Library as the institution that houses Terry Southern’s estate, would you do a portratit of Terry?’ And I said, of course, man, absolutely, I would do it in a heartbeat. I mean, the films were one thing, but reading him is more important for people in our culture to get a handle on the impact that the guy had. You know, he’s on the album cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band right next to Lenny Bruce and Edgar Allen Poe.”
Also in his “circle of men” are “Joseph Campbell, James Hillman … In my studio, I want to be surrounded by grandiose, monumental images of my time; and I’ve met these guys. I’ve made it a point to meet these guys. Ram Dass is one of them. Ram Dass changed my life in the middle of my life. I didn’t meet Terry Southern, he died in ‘95, I know his son. Here’s the point that I want to make: There’s this underground, underlying generation of people. Niles Southern, he may be a figure, but Richard Montoya is one of my collectors—he bought the ‘Pink Marilyn’ and the ‘Blue Kennedy’ and then I did a portrait of him. It’s not just old dead writers that I have a great admiration for. It’s the guys that are doing it now.”