Juxtapoz Magazine – Matt Bollinger: The Realist of Fantasy

Wow, alright, damn. And where was this? 

Kansas Town, Missouri. ​​It was a major deal when I was increasing up mainly because he experienced massive scars all more than his physique and he’d had two open up heart surgeries. In any case, he was just normally becoming operated on. He was 20 when it happened, so it was like, “Whoa, this is a thing I want to doc.” He was driving this manufacturer new 1970 Z28 Camaro at the time of the stabbing, so that car keeps showing up in my get the job done. Anyway, I recorded this job interview and it became a superstructure, this narrative that my work was filling out. I manufactured a 17-foot drawing of the environment and there was a sculpture with seem that performed with the drawing. So, it was a chatting drawing or a thing, essentially anticipating how the animation would work, in a way. 

This is a extremely lengthy remedy, but the function arrives about by observation, documentary investigate and memory. Fiction and drawing, for me, are really linked up, and it turns into a way of adhering with each other distinct experiences to make a structure that could then exist in the perform.

You mentioned, as a kid, currently being sent off to your space, wherever you would attract and develop these fantasy worlds with drawing. Do you assume you are portray fantasy worlds now?

I feel it occupies the identical portion of my imagination. It is a brain house that composites together lots of different activities and factors are alive in there. It would not feel like a memory. That’s where the fictionalization course of action is. It’s a catalyst that activates all those various substances that get put in there. Yeah, it feels the exact same. I was generally getting form of accused of too much daydreaming. I believe it actually aggravated my dad since I would just make some oversight in the true world mainly because it was like I could hardly see out of my eyes for the reason that I was hunting… they have been turned about backwards.

I feel it can be in the Furlough collection, which I enjoy, there is a portray of guys all around the pickup truck. And to me, it can be the most actual scene, but it is really also this attractive, fuzzy memory of a put. It can be this sort of attractive realism and a fantasy, as effectively. I love the way you equilibrium that.

I think it can be mainly because the paintings get manufactured by me carrying out a good deal of sketching. Then I commence them abstractly with just paint, so the process is a very little bit like location an intention ahead of you do some meditation. I know I want to paint that picture of a small, 3 inch drawing that I have right right before me, but then I have to search into the portray to have that graphic be form of discovered to me. So, in that act of painting, I am normally on the lookout deeper and deeper into the portray and I glimpse significantly less and a lot less exterior of it.

At the starting of the method, I’m undertaking this abstract things, but then I start out to construct the graphic. I experienced drawings of the truck and drawings of some of the personal men’s faces, as nicely as drawings of a boot, just so I know what the stuff was but then I search considerably less and a lot less at that and additional and a lot more into the do the job, which is where by it almost certainly starts off to choose on that marginally fantasy glimpse. It is really a parallel earth that closely resembles ours.