Biography
Matt Pinney is an artist living and working in Washington D.C. He has shown his work nationally and internationally. Pinney is an Associate Professor at Northern Virginia Community College’s Manassas campus where he teaches studio art. He was also a faculty member at The Art League at the Torpedo Factory from 2012-2019 where he won the Clemente Faculty Award at the Patron’s show in 2017. Pinney has been awarded the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities Fellowship for the past five years and the purchase award from DCCAH’s Washington Collection in 2016, 2017 and 2019. Pinney received his Masters of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and his Bachelors of Fine Arts from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
Artist Statement
Everything is pandemic.
Throughout most of the pandemic I was without a partner. I fantasized about having someone. I was lonely, easily aroused, and tired of seeing the same faces. Erotic paintings became a release. Quickly made and quickly consumed. They’re meant to be a little shocking and they give me a rise. But, there is a darkness in them, too. Without a real person on the other end some level of perversion rears itself. Light is a secondary sensory focus, as is touch. The yellow of a lamp at night, morning light through the window, a hand pressed into flesh. These paintings are about the power of the imagination, and how visceral it can be.
This spring, the arrival of flowers in my garden became a different meditation on sexuality. Flowers only need a little nurturing and then they come on their own. They are universally loved. I’ve always kept many plants and have spent the past decade attending to the garden at my home. This, my last summer here, I decided to paint short meditations on the flowers as they come up. This became a guiltless form of appreciating sex in nature. By looking at something in front of you for 30 minutes to an hour and capturing its shapes and its color one can internalize the simplicity of its essence. The paintings are done in a way that recognizes how quickly the flower’s petals fall away until the next spring.
These paintings celebrate the ephemeral.
