Artwork Notes & Backstories | MATT BEARD ART

Bending Lines

02/16/2015

You know those painters you see outside on sunny days with their fancy umbrellas, leisurely painting away on the manicured park lawn? I don’t know if they’ve spent much
time in the coastal zone.

I recently got one of those fancy umbrellas for myself. Seemed like a great idea at the time. I even got one that was silver on top to reflect heat and black underneath to
reduce glare, and with about 87 different clamp options to attach to nearly anything. It really is a marvel of modern engineering.

And it’s basically worthless. I used it as I was painting this one on a beautiful windless day until what I’d call a very light breeze finally came up, not much, but magnified by the cliff-face beneath me, and that thing warped itself into all manners of hideous misshapes and bending lines, an origami of umbrellic obscenities, threatening to topple my whole easel and send it down the cliff. I will not be using it again.

On the brighter side, I really like how this turned out and solved a nagging visual problem, using simple horizontal strokes to define bending lines of swell.

Now that is something I will use again.

-Entry on February 16, 2015

Vicarious

12/04/2014

Unplanned live art from The Accident Lab poetry event last night. Kinda different, maybe someone will dig it… or maybe not. I might be stuck with this one.

Fire Fusion

10/30/2014

So I think I’m going to just start enjoying water more as I do these live art paintings. This one I just relaxed and felt like painting a mix of explosive fire and water. It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but when completing a large painting in just two and a half hours, it rarely is. What it was though, was super fun. I think just zoning out and painting water is where it’s at for me right now, and I’m looking forward to more.

The Jewel V: Wednesday Afternoon

10/22/2014

This was the first time I was given access to this deck on the end of this scientific research pier. I remember being so torn about which view to paint, north or south, that I think I just blew a fuse and split it down the middle with an easterly approach. I figured since it was so unusual to even be there at all, maybe this unusual perspective made the most sense.

Big thanks to my pal @misfitgallerylj for making this one possible as part of my first sold out La Jolla plein air tour.

There’s someone else to thank as well, but names should probably not be mentioned at this point. You know who you are. And you rock. Thank you.

Evolution of Icarus

09/20/2014

So… sometimes this happens. When I paint at live events, half the fun is not knowing exactly what I’m going to paint. Even as I’m loading my palette with paint I’m usually still wondering what’s going to happen. At RampArt Skatepark last weekend, this is what happened. Not sure what’s going on here, but one thing led to another and another and another and I guess that’s just how it goes.

The story of Icarus is pretty cool, a warning against pride, but while we mostly seem to focus on that aspect of the tale, we often forget his father’s warning wasn’t just about flying too high, but also too low. Get up off the ground and quit slacking, yeah? Good call. The flying fish has it wired I reckon.

Anyway, I’m sure anyone could read all sorts of other stuff into this, and so could I, but art is more poetry than essay, so I won’t go into all that.

Anyway, hope you dig this little unexpected homage to the master of this genre, Rick Griffin himself. Enjoy!

Flow

09/07/2014

It may look like a wave, but if you rotate this piece counter-clockwise it represents the real time wind conditions off the Pacific coast at the time the painting was being created. Check out earth.nullschool.net if you want to see what I’m talking about.

Crab Haul

August 20, 2014

I painted this one years ago
From a weathered photograph
It was a Christmas gift
From a daughter
To her father

She was a young child
When the photo was taken
From the Old Trinidad Pier
Of her dad and his crew
On his boat down below

She said they ate good
Really, really good that year
I imagined them eating
Juicy butter-dripping crab
For every meal

She just laughed
After the lean years
Of cornbread and beans
This was the year
Their ship finally came in

They didn’t eat crab
They ate whatever they wanted
Wherever they wanted

And you might be thinking
Of a working-class family
That just came into extra money

And you might not be wrong

But I’ll ask you right now
To think of this young child
Enjoying her family’s joy
And remembering it
After all these years
After the photo is faded
Tattered
Torn around the edges
Asking an artist
To give that sweet memory
Back to her father

Now

Tell me again
When did their ship come in?

On the Rocks

06/11/2014

Painted on site with the rising tide sending large amounts of saltwater all over my back and palette as I worked. There may not be blood, sweat, or tears in this one, but there is certainly a good dose of Pacific Ocean saltwater, and that’s almost the same thing from a salinity perspective…

Insinuation XII: It Will Be What It Will Be

June 1, 2014

And it will be what it will be

Breakwall

05/30/2014

Recent Live Art piece from the Save the Waves fundraiser in SF a few weeks back. I’m really stoked how this one turned out. I went with a simple image of a wave about to break into a breakwall, an enigmatic comment on our role in shaping the shoreline, creating and destroying surf breaks along the way. I figured it would be relevant to the cause. Not sure if any of that came across at all, but still I was stoked to be a part of their event and raise a few dollars for them along the way.

Hand Jive

05/06/2014

Painted live at the San Diego Surf Film Festival, 2014. Throughout the 4 day event, contributing filmmakers were asked to trace a print of their hands on this 36″ x 36″ canvas. On the final day, I incorporated their hands into this finished piece.

Mid-Morning

November 25, 2011

If you spend any time at all in this town, do yourself a favor and find a different mode of transportation than a rusty old van. Parking is nuts to non-existent and navigating the unfamiliar streets in a vehicle that can’t hop curbs, cut over embankments and weave through crowds of pedestrians really hinders one’s getting around here. A bike however, opens the world. A borrowed bike with a friend or two to follow around is even better. They’ll know all the fun zigs and zags.

I recall this morning clearly, even though it was quite a few years ago. My old college roommate was living in town here and had the day off work when I rolled through so we
grabbed the bikes and hit the trails, roads, paths, walkways, dirt hills, etc., on the way across town for morning surf checks and coffee accumulations. This was before the age of cell phone cameras, so I brought a camera with me in case anything caught my eye. The borrowed bike I rode was a bit unruly for one-handed use on the crowded bike path that follows the shore here, so once we procured the coffee and rode on, things got difficult. I’d managed to get this far without incident, but no further. Fortunately the landing was soft, the camera intact, and somehow, against all odds the coffee remained unspilled. After brushing off and taking inventory I snapped a photo, and later painted this.

First Look

December 30, 2010

I’ve been told lately
That I didn’t paint this one quite right
Or it must be somewhere else
That our local jetty doesn’t look like this
That it’s all busted up
And full of holes
Where the ocean pours in
And leaves salt in every wound

But I painted this a long time ago
From photos and memories
Made even earlier
We never had 4 wheel drives
And the sand road wasn’t so well packed yet
So we walked along the edge of the seawall
Unbroken
From the carpark to the rusted chain
Our first view
Was this

Looking at it now
It’s easy to forget
That there was a time
A time and half a time before
When the path that we walked
Wasn’t falling apart
And once in awhile
A painting like this
Let’s us stop
And remember

Surf Check Daydream

December 22, 2009

The first art teacher I ever had used to always tell us that all art is a lie. I never really understood what he meant by that, but it sounded pretty neat and quite teacherly.

Generally, I gravitate toward truth-telling with my art and most inaccuracies in my paintings are accidents of omission. I’m just not one to paint every single blade of grass and individual leaves on every tree.

There’s an ancient text that repeats the theme that all men are like grass, referring to the brevity and fleeting nature of our lives on the face of the earth.

More often than not, I treat humans in the landscape as the blades of grass that they are, fleeting, ephemeral, just passing through for a moment before they move on.

Sometimes it lends to an eerie silent vibe in my paintings of places that should be full of human activity, but showing no trace of it except those features we’ve built into a more
semi-permanent state on the landscape itself- roads, benches, stairs, paths, etc.

This is one of those spooky ones.

That said, I’m not sure which is the bigger lie here: the complete lack of human beings on a glorious sun-filled afternoon here… or the sandbar creating ruler edged perfect waves from that outside rock all the way to the sand 200 yards later.

Neither of those ever happen.

Hence the title: Surf Check Daydream indeed.

Waxing Moon

December 21, 2009

My favorite story about this one isn’t my story at all. It’s something a Patagonia employee said the first time they saw this piece in the back of my van in their HQ parking lot in Ventura, California. It went something like this:

“This is heavy, no way, check it out, when you look to the right it’s what’s already happened, the wave has gone by, that’s the past, you don’t want to live there. But then when you look to the left that’s future, what’s to come, something to look forward to, but that’s not where you want to live either. When you look at the center that’s the present moment, that’s where you want to be.”

I’ve always remembered that, even though I’ve forgotten his name and have lost all touch with the fellow who uttered that wisdom off the cuff like only a barefoot surfer in a parking lot in southern California could muster…

Afternoon on the Coast Route

November 15, 2008

This is one of the first paintings I painted of this location. I’d go on to paint many more over the years, but none quite as refined as this one painted over ten years ago. It was
painted at home in the quietness of my studio.

This is as good a time as any to point out what I love about painting on location in “plein air” instead of in the studio- real stuff happens out there. You never know what you’ll see when you post up for a few hours in a single spot and simply observe the world around you.

The last time I recall painting here on location with a friend, as we stood at our easels on the side of the frontage road above the train tracks we heard some yelling down below, just to the south. Some folks across the inlet were yelling at a hobo lady to get off the tracks. A train could be heard in the distance and after a string of fatalities on these
very tracks, nobody was eager to see another one.

As might be expected, hobo ladies don’t like to be yelled at any more than you or I would, even when we’re doing something foolish, so she did what any self-respecting
hobo lady might do and promptly flipped the bird to all. To the shouting crowd, to the painters on the cliff, and to the oncoming train.

You could hear the train straining to come to a stop, whistle blowing, tension rising with each passing second revealing the momentous impossibility of this train stopping in time. It appeared a certain suicide by desperate defiance was about to unfold.

At the last possible second the hobo lady stepped off the tracks, and of all the times to slip and fall on one’s rear end, this was not the best of them. The train just missed her
head and finally came to a stop 50 yards down the line.

To her credit, even though she fell, she never dropped the bird. Take that, world. She quickly regained composure and sauntered off into the bushes as the conductor got
out and walked the line, likely looking for her lifeless body, which would not be found today, thank you very much.

Just another afternoon on the coast route.

Shoebox Series I

December 15, 2007

The Shoebox Series was inspired by a friend’s shoebox full of old surf photographs he and his friends had taken of each other over the years. Realizing that almost every lifelong surfer has a stash of photographic evidence of their surfing lives stowed away somewhere, I went to my local surf buddies and heroes alike, asking for a few of their snapshots that capture what surfing here in Humboldt means to them. These became the inspirations for the series, which went on to be published in the Surfer’s Journal in 2008 (Volume 17, #3).