Matt Crookshank - Artist Statement

I paint abstract narrative that function as the breath between sentences, the unspoken periods, the indent. I am painting the structure of existence, the biology, the anxiety, the illusions, and the dreams that disappear before we wake up. I strive to create enigmas that challenge perception and defy deconstruction; illusions and magic spells that vibrate vertebrae and tickle nerve endings.

A shade is the insubstantial remains of the dead, a phantom without a body or the power of thought. My paintings are a residue much like a shade. Like toxic exhaust, peripheral strangers, and plaque that builds up slowly. That cocoon of schemas, assumptions and anxieties, a web of mythologies and ideologies, my work is an exploration of the place where ideas meet and tangle to form new beasts, new nightmares, new beautiful collapses and pleasurable failures.