enpen: Which technique/trick do you find yourself using the most in your art (e.g. horizon line, cross-hatch, etc.)?

Matthew: If I were to tell you the most useful trick in my arsenal, it would no longer by a trick. Therefore destroying the entire experience of visual art for the viewer...

As an artist, what about red is important to your work?

As a viewer, what about red is important to you?



Had you all the time and resources in the world, what story/history would you put into visual form and how would you do it?

The only one I know.

Grasping at straws is like submarines with a couple screen doors.

If 1+1=3 then I really don't know, I was never all that good at arithmetic.

It's the water and I know how to use it.

Matthew’s work is at Metro Body Piercing (214 4th Ave E) during Artswalk weekend (April 25th & 26th).

enpen: Science Fiction author Brian Aldis has said that for him writing a novel requires two ideas, "the familiar" (an everyday in his life) must come first and then be affected by "the exotic" (beyond experience). Looking at your work I'm struck time and again by how familiar the forms are despite the abstract whole. Do you find yourself working more often from a starting point of the tangible or the metaphysical?

Laura Sharp Wilson: My images are tangible to me though I'm never sure of their outcome. I hope they are metaphysical to everyone else. It is my world and I hope nobody else occupies it.

To be accurate, this person is not a panhandler, he is a street performer. Go check him out most evenings along 4th Ave!

Name: Richard

Age: 29

Hobbies: Music and Cooking. "Soon I'll be in an apartment and I want to go to SPSCC to study music first, then cooking. I already have 6 months of community college from Seattle, so I have a head start."

Favorite Books: The Bible, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Hobbit, Grimms Fairy Tales and poetry by William Blake and Jim Morrison

Favorite Movies: Apocalypse Now, Young Guns, Maverick, Last of the Mohicans, Legend, The Princess Bride

I came across this quote about activism from a 2003 interview and it made me think of you folks on Olyblog. Bonus: the author quoted, Ursula K. Le Guin, is even semilocal! Oregon-based, I think she lives somewhere in Portland. Here is what she had to say:

[Interviewer Erika Milo]: I’ve read that last December you were part of a writers’ and artists’ anti-war delegation to Oregon congressman David Wu, and in April participated in a protest against the USA Patriot Act. Were there ever any responses to those protests, beyond the initial news coverage?

[Ursula K. Le Guin]: The response to such protests, to demonstrations and vigils, is mostly invisible and usually pretty slow-moving. We learned that, all the years demonstrating for civil rights and against atomic bomb tests and against the war in Viet Nam. If you want an immediate response you throw a stone. Civil disobedience may be the only way to address an urgent wrong, but it is likely to backfire and cause dismay and disaffection among the very people you are trying to win over. Walking and standing are awfully, awfully slow. You feel like a fool standing there with your sign saying Bush Lied, and people go by in cars yelling things like "Why do you hate America?" that they learned from Rush Limbaugh. But you go on standing there. It worked before. It will work again.

Anyway, I thought she expressed my feeliongs more elegantly than I ever could. From this article in the magazine West By Northwest.