A reader asks Matt whether he believes sight is the most important of the five senses.

Matt responds:

When it comes to painting, sight is the beginning and the end.I always paint to music that will distract me from what I’m seeing, get me and my spirit outside my body, so I’m not relying upon my senses and my known knowledge, but my inner knowledge that I know nothing about:  to awaken within myself some part of the billions of years that are stored inside of me.

If I try to use my education or my experiences only, then I create piles of crap.  To me, separating art into identifiable knowledge is impossible.

The synthesis of that is how I live my life.  I don’t stop every time I come to a stop light and think, “Hmm, do I stop or go forward on red?  What about yellow?”  That kind of over-thinking really screws me up!

To me, that is the challenge of a painter:  to get out of the ego, the self, the evaluation of who and what we are, and let go.  At least that’s what I do.

Once I start thinking I’m controlling something in my work, it just turns to “Ho hum, what’s this?”

I love to think of joining the Dorothy and the Tin Man and the rest of them and go charging down the Yellow Brick Road.  That’s what I’m always looking for:  the Wizard, who is constantly hiding—except that once I get out of the way, the Wizard comes and leads the way.

The only place I’ve been that I didn’t like was a place I found using a road map instead of jumping out the window and running backwards!

Matt