Matt McLeod's Ahead of the Herd joins the collection of New Mexico Arts. Placed at WESST Enterprise Center Business Incubator in Albuquerque.
“Ahead of The Herd was a preparatory painting for a studio presentation of work on paper to the Arkansas Arts Center Collectors Group. A scene of two young bulls found one morning in a winter field in North Texas. The scene reminds me of so many I have found on my travels in the Southwest United States, including Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and my home state of Arkansas… cows in a field. Pretty mundane until you pull the scene apart and reassemble the pieces. As I moved into the painting process, I focused on the story of the morning light in this scene - how the light accentuated the color of the grass and the patterns on the cow hides. Once I see an interesting visual pattern of tonal values and color temperature start to appear, as I did in this case; I then push the work to embrace and elevate the pattern. It’s about light, color, energy and emotional response at that point. My intention is to make the mundane transcend to vibrant, energetic and exciting.”
“Ahead of The Herd was a preparatory painting for a studio presentation of work on paper to the Arkansas Arts Center Collectors Group. A scene of two young bulls found one morning in a winter field in North Texas. The scene reminds me of so many I have found on my travels in the Southwest United States, including Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and my home state of Arkansas… cows in a field. Pretty mundane until you pull the scene apart and reassemble the pieces. As I moved into the painting process, I focused on the story of the morning light in this scene - how the light accentuated the color of the grass and the patterns on the cow hides. Once I see an interesting visual pattern of tonal values and color temperature start to appear, as I did in this case; I then push the work to embrace and elevate the pattern. It’s about light, color, energy and emotional response at that point. My intention is to make the mundane transcend to vibrant, energetic and exciting.”
RSS Feed
