Matt Chinian and I are very different in most ways but similar in others. I guess I could say that about almost everyone I know.

Matt is giving four of his paintings to the Mansion to hang on their new Activity Room wall. I insisted on paying him $100 for each. Artists should not have to work for free.

I found a fine artist and a fascinating artist.

We are both artists who listen to the beat of our own drums and cling to our individual sense of ethics and values, even when the world seems to be moving in another direction.

Now that I mention it, the world is almost always moving in another direction from me.

I think of Matt as solitary.

I think painting is inherently lonely, as is writing or most unique art. We work alone; if we don’t support and encourage ourselves, no one else is there to do it.

There is nobody watching our backs.

We send our words and work and art out into the world, where it is as apt to die as live. Rejection is no stranger to anyone who lives a creative life.

Once in a million times, lightning strikes, and we no longer have to worry about money or success.

Then there’s the real world. I live in it. Matt lives in it.

 

 

If we don’t have money, at least we have work that we love and are committed to doing right up to the end. We aren’t marketers, but there is no paycheck coming every Friday.

If we don’t market our work, we don’t have any money to pay our bills.

There are two kinds of people in our world. People who get paid regularly, and people who don’t. The two worlds are very different.

The creative life is a solitary life but also a satisfying one.

Sacred to me are the men and women who do what they love. They never have to work a day in their lives.

I don’t believe the Tik-Tok, Instagram, and media super hype. Everyone in the world is there. Very few artists are rich, and social media is no super train to success.

It’s the same old story. You work hard, in good times or bad, and when the times are bad, you just work harder.

I don’t know Matt well; I had lunch with him some years ago and haven’t seen him since. We are, after all, men.

We re-connected this week when I asked him if he might give us some paintings to hang on the Mansion Activities Room Wall. I felt a strong kinship with him.

 

 

(Matt painted this picture from the Mansion porch. The residents will love looking at it, especially in the winter.)

We’ve been talking over the last few days, and I admire his integrity, talent, and determination.

I want to add him to my blog list of people I admire and write about. They are all good people, at least to me, and worthy of attention.

I’m going to visit Matt on some of his painting sites – like Edward Hopper, he paints real things and gives them stature and emotion.

He agreed to let me take some pictures of him yesterday as he prepared his paintings for their trek to the Mansion and we got to know one another again.

 

 

Matt is intensely committed to his work. He went to Bennington College to study art and worked as a carpenter for 25 years. When he turned 50, he returned to painting and has painted 2,000 works since then.

He has a studio on his property and has sold many paintings. Many of them are exceptional, but he doesn’t know how many he’s painted.

There are a dozen categories of images listed on his blog, from farming to landscape to industrial art to street life and the waterfront. He has a lot of each.

Matt calls his art “Prosaic Realism,” his truth of the world. I’m not sure yet exactly what that means, but I think he is committed to portraying the world and how real people, not artists,  see it.

(From The Mansion Porch)

In this way, art is no longer something remote and obscure but something we can all recognize, see and feel. Matt doesn’t live for money any more than I do. He lives for his family and his art.

Yesterday, inspired by my talk with Matt,  I took a photo of a volunteer fireman washing down a fire engine before a Fourth Of July parade.

It wasn’t a work of art, but a work of life. I guess that can be art also.

Matt does most of his work in the late afternoon, within eight miles of his studio.

There is no way to describe the bulk of his career, his eye and paintings range all over the place, and even in this small town, he always finds something to paint.

This gives his work an eclectic, true-to-life feel. Small things often mean big things to people. Browsing up and down his website, I was surprised, again and again.

 

(I bought three photos for $100 a piece, well below their sales price. I didn’t have any more money, they are all worth more. This beautiful painting is of the old rail yards that cut through the center of our town. These days, we might get one train a day, but the residents walk near there all the time, and they will love seeing that evocative image up on the walls.)

Matt says he had a happy childhood and is devoted to his wife and children.

Still, when he talks about his work, a sadness comes out, a kind of regret and uncertainty.

He doesn’t evoke confidence in his talent; he charges ahead and keeps going. He’s a bit gloomy. There is no trace of arrogance in him.

There is something heroic about his talent and perseverance to me.

It is not simple to be an artist; it takes resilience, strength, and the ability to encourage themselves and work alone, with no direction but the gut.

He’s produced a massive body of work that will one day mesmerize scholars looking to understand our time’s frantic and distracting life. Matt offers a different view of life, familiar, slow, and soothing. His world does not change much.

His blog is rich in art and feeling. Some of his paintings are $1,600; many are $200. I see a lot of pictures for $200 I would love to have on one of our walls. Some are pretty Hopperish, like this one for $1,600. I love it.

 

 

It’s great fun to browse through Matt’s gallery online. He asked me what I thought of his blog, and I told him it was great; the only thing missing was him. His life and view of art are original and fascinating.

I said how he picks his subject, paints it, and then sends it out into the world.

He often does a painting in a day. His work has a spontaneity and reality that is rare.

Like most people, he trembles at the idea of exposing their private life. Lots of people feel that way, even if they and their work are never heard from again. I don’t feel that way, obviously.

My argument, which is usually dismissed, is that we don’t need to reveal anything more or less than we want.  I am as open and private as I wish to be. I have my issues, but the Internet helps me, it doesn’t control me.

Like most artists and creatives, Matt is grappling with how to sell his art on the frantic and overwhelming Internet.

I am a minority in this, sometimes there are lightning strikes on Facebook or Instagram or Tik-Tok, but it is really rare.

People spend an enormous amount of time on those sites, looking for praise and recognition,  but if you ask them, they will admit they sell little or nothing.

It’s just too crowded and frantic.

When I started my blog, none of the experts thought it was a good idea. My publisher thought it was foolish, a waste of time. My blog is just right for me, I get to write what I want when I want. It is about my life, not just my photos or my dogs.

It is important for me to write about other people as well as me, it gets me outside of my head.

I was told again and again that I had to publish in a dozen places online where there were no blogs like mine or writing in my style and voice. That made and still makes no sense to me.

The blog is coherent, colorful, easy to access, and relatively peaceful. There is always something new on it.

People who like it can find it. People who don’t like me can leave. I write for me.

I write about spirituality, animals, my life, my photography, and politics once in a rare while. And I take a lot of photos, which are all free.

People contribute to me and the blog when they can. I get by.

I hope Matt chooses to write about himself and his process on his blog. I think it would work for him.

Art and life are not separate things. Matt is very interesting and also very thoughtful.

If people got to know him, I believe they would attach to him, as many have to me, for all of my foibles and faults. They would want his art in the same way Maria’s blog readers want hers.

They understand where it comes from.

Matt can be as open or closed as he wishes; nobody will tell him what to write.

A blog is a coherent form of communication for me, but that’s just me. Everyone has to make up their own mind.

We can all use the Internet, but the challenge is to remain authentic and genuine to ourselves. And as we know, there are legions of nasties and crazies out there, as well as lovely people.

 

(The final four.)

Matt insists on donating the painting on the left of a flower in a bottle. It’s beautiful. I’m grateful. The others are the Mansion Porch, the Cambridge Rail Yard, and a landscape of hills just outside town. All four are going into the Activity Room; Paryese may divert one or more to the Memory Care Unit.

I’m going to propose expanding this art project to the hallways outside of the resident’s rooms. We’ll see what happens.

I’m bringing them to the Mansion Tuesday morning, along with two flower pictures from Jackie Thorne.