MATTHEW SIEVERS: Bold Marks

Matthew Sievers paints the beauty he encounters in rural places, giving new perspective to common subjects like weathered old barns, mountain lakes and minimal landscapes set against vast emotional skies. The expressiveness of his paintings exemplify his restless surge toward perfection and a dedication to portray his subjects in fresh ways. His overall painting style is best described as bold and gestural, yet he is always exploring new mediums and their various effects, pushing abstraction, alternating transparency and opaqueness, and employing splatters, drips, angular brushstrokes, scraping and glazing to achieve ever-richer texture and complexity. Light, and how it filters through each composition is a key feature in Sievers’ paintings.

“Memories are what I paint,” says Sievers. “When we remember,” he continues, “we are looking back through veils of time, and that feeling is what I strive to achieve in each painting as I build up layers, alternate thin glazes with big, thick emotional scrapes and drags. Once that foundation is in place, I add broadly gestural, calligraphic lines and rhythms along with carefully orchestrated fine detail.” For Sievers, the art should convey emotion and evoke feeling.

Sievers new show, Bold Marks, will continue the theme of the artist portraying a diverse selection of subjects. Large scale singular trees, old barns, epic skies, and mountain glacier or aspen scenes will compose a large portion of the show. The artist also recently conveyed his desire to bring focus back to figurative work with a few horses and riders integrated into some of his big sky paintings. In his early years of painting, Sievers recalls portraying a lot of horses and figures and looks forward to getting back to that, at least for a while.