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Matt Woodward’s artwork is reminiscent of a daydream or of recapturing only a part of a memory; you know it is there, and yet it is never quite within your grasp. You sense it, yet can not see it. I was touched by it from the first impression.  Woodward is a Chicago based artist whose work is inspired by the “memories of grandeur” implicit in the decay he experiences in the architecture and environment around him.

I had a chance to ask him about his work, the following are excerpts from that conversation:

“It is tough to get into all that (when asked what inspires his creativity)… but I think so much about making art is that brilliant digression. I think a lot of the work is simply about being in a city, about looking directly at the understated parts of a city and being right there with every little change in it. Like a gate or a cage; you are watching it and there it goes, changing on again, constructing and reconstructing. That faithful issue of conflict between there being a finite presence and an infinite absence.

I have been looking at Clyfford Still, Antonio Garcia Lopez and Louis Sullivan’s drawings. You start thinking about it so much and it goes away, look directly and its not there and your on to something else.

You look right at [my drawings] and they, too, are rather eluding, almost transparent, they are manipulated deliberately that way and I think that is because of the experience of space that [without] specific context for them there is prompted a separate context anew.

I have a fussy patience with looking at architecture, more so with the process of encountering it, confronting it. Its a metaphor for everything.”

Matt Woodward
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