Artist James Mattison on Finding a Maine Landscape All His Own

And today it's my pleasure to speak with one of our newest artists, James Mattison, who has recently joined the Portland Art Gallery, but has been on the Maine art scene for quite a while now. Thanks for coming in and having a conversation with me. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Thank you. I love that you've experienced art from a lot of different angles.You're sort of a Portland person. You grew up here in Maine, but in addition to working with galleries, you also were a security guard for the Portland Museum of Art. Is that correct? Yep. For a couple years. So it seems like you were always kind of finding your way back to art in different ways. Yeah. And I don't know if that was intentional. I think it's just something that I have to do is kind of be around it and pursue it. But yeah, it's been in my life since I was a kid. James, you grew up in Portland. And did you go to- Well, I didn't grow up in Portland. I was born in Born in Portland. Okay. All right. Grew up in Oakland, Maine, which is next to Waterville. So I went to Messalonskee High School. So it's like four districts. It's Oakland, Sydney, Belgrade and Rome. So it's a big high school. That's mostly where I grew up. And then we moved back down to the Portland area around 2011. So I practiced up in Waterville for a bit. When I was a medical director, I oversaw practices out in Oakland. So I've actually been to Oakland. Awesome. Even though it's kind of funny when you're in Portland, right? You end up being mostly in Portland and you don't have to get too far outside of sort of the suburbs to be in real Maine. And I would say Oakland, not that Portland's not real Maine, but I would say that Oakland is absolutely a different version of Did you have a lot of encouragement to engage in art when you were up in that area? I mean, the Colby Museum has been a great museum for a long time. So they have the Alex Katz Foundation up there as well. So that was always something that was kind of close that I could always check out. But I think just, like I said, I've always just kind of grown up drawing or being interested in art and always that was the thing I was good at as a student. Math and English were like, "I just need a passing grade." But I really loved drawing and painting. And so I enjoyed those classes. I did get most artistic in high school, so that was cool, I guess. But yeah, I think people have seen kind of from the start that this is a love of mine and it's always been supported. Well, I've been impressed with the amount of credit that you give to people who have mentored you and also to the support of the artistic community. I mean, I truly get the sense that you've evolved through your relationships with other people, whether they're people who are specifically artists or people who teach art to you, but also people who are kind of supportive of the work that you do. So it seems as though you really ... I've seen this at the gallery where you're showing up at all the openings and all the events and you're interacting with other artists, but really people in the community. So has community always been important to you and has mentorship always been important to you? Yes. Just me as a person, I have a close knit of people and that's always been a big deal for me, but having a sense of community in a shared passion is huge and that's something that you kind of need to find. It's not always going to be there, but that just comes through working at it and finding my minded people. And being part of the Portland Art Gallery now is just, I'm so excited to be in this new community with a lot of like-minded people. Yeah. I've noticed that you've already gotten into sort of the Portland Art Gallery coffee group, like Rick Hamilton and Paige Eastburn O'Rourke and Greg Day and Annie Darling, and who I think they're all really great people and really very creative. So being with people who are similarly kind of creatively minded, does that influence your work? Does it cause you to feel like, "Okay, well, here's some new ideas that I can bring to the canvas," or just cause you to want to kind of get into the work so that you can explore some of the things that you've been ... Yeah. I mean, the Coffee Talk is really just a bunch of artists complaining about their day to day and how your thought process and your work ethic towards painting just changes all the time. So it's like a nice way to kind of relate to other artists in that sense. We're not really coming up with concepts or things like that, but it is like a good release to just kind of be like, "Man, I haven't been able to paint in the last couple of weeks, but everybody there understands that's just part of the process and you have to kind of accept it and roll with it. " And usually you get something good out of those struggles too. That's actually really good to know because I think that from talking to a lot of artists, it can be a very solitary thing to be creating your art in the studio. And ultimately, I think for most artists that there is some amount of solitude that's involved. So I would think that getting in your own head about these times of when your brain's working on things, but you're not quite ready to get your hands involved, I would think that that would be somehow validating for you as an individual. I agree. I think it's like a working relationship with art and being an artist and it's a lot of give and take. And there's times where you paint eight paintings or something and you don't really care about any of them, but then the next one is like, "All right, that was a home run and that one felt really good." And that one speaks to me as like what I was trying to do. Even though those other eight paintings might speak to a whole audience of other people, there's plenty of times where you paint something and you can't stand it, but it gets a lot of good feedback and you're like, it's like it's good and bad because you want your work to be appreciated and liked, but at the same sense it wasn't necessarily what you were going for. But I think that's, like I said, it's part of the journey and kind of figuring out what works for you and what works for others. Not that you're always painting for others, but I mean, input is important as an artist too. There's a piece that you've done that you and I were talking about before, which is very Maine. It's cut wood, Cut logs and all sort of end on. And I love it because one of the things that I think is interesting is I don't think about that as being a source of art and yet it's very relatable for somebody who used to stack wood for the family wood stove. It was part of a family project. I think a lot of us who grew up in Maine have that same experience. So would you describe that piece as one of the pieces that you felt was really it spoke to you or was it one that you are surprised that other people maybe could relate to? That was a home run for me. That one felt great. And that one was from, we just went on a trip up north to the Allagash and it's just all logging roads up there, just miles of dirt roads and spent six days out in the woods and just driving past these massive log piles. So I mean, they're taller than the truck, they're big and I don't know, just driving by them, it's eye catching and when I finally snapped a couple photos of them and you start seeing it differently as just a bunch of circles and a lot of different colors going on. So you kind of breaking it down into like a composition and then yeah, it worked out. And to me, that one, like I'm always trying to find a depiction of Maine that's not necessarily like a motif of what we regularly see in art galleries. I'm trying to find those pockets of Maine that are still Maine, but not always represented. So landscapes are huge for me, but that was like a side of Maine that represented a huge industry. Well, I think it came out great. I mean, it's very striking. And in fact, for the group show, it's something that Emma Wilson and Sean Thomas and Jess Brayboy, when they were curating that group show, they put in the front window. So I mean, I think that that speaks to something that they also feel the way that you do. And I also think it, again, going back to this idea that we live in the Portland area, Portland is a wonderful city and it's very different than, because I've been up to the Allagash, I've driven on the logging roads. I was actually doing some locums, some temporary work as a physician up in Northern Maine, and you're right that you're in the middle of these enormous kind of swaths of clear cut with logs that have been, I don't know, the trees have been growing for centuries and there's just this very different sense of time when you're up there and the types of industry that Maine has been involved in for centuries now. So I love that you're pulling those pieces in because, I mean, I also love ocean scenes. Those are great, but Maine is a lot of different things. So you're speaking to these, as you said, these pockets. Yeah. But it also comes with the experience of being there and seeing that other side of Maine. And something that I try to do as a Mainer and as an artist is just kind of find myself in all these different pockets or look for them. It's hard not to ... Obviously, I love being on the coast and it's an inspiration in itself, but it's a big state. There's got a lot going on as far as landscape and inspiration. So I do my best to kind of look for those different perspectives. So you said you moved down to Portland in 2011. And what was the turning point? That was around the time when I lost my father and so my mother moved down to Cape Elizabeth to be closer to family and started kind of figuring out Portland again because as a kid, I always just loved going to Portland with my parents. If they had a job to do, I would just kind of tag along as a city fan. But then I was really able to kind of immerse myself back then and become part of Portland a little bit. I eventually did leave Maine to go to school or finish my degree, really. And that was something I think I needed to do after losing my dad and kind of just find myself again. But as you know, I leave Maine and kind of figure myself out, I realize, okay, Maine is home, I miss it. You kind of have to leave to learn how much you love it in a sense and how good it is here. So you were 19 when your father passed away? Yeah. That's a lot. That's a big loss. It was. Yeah, it still is. It's always going to be something that you're working through in one way or the other. When you were talking about your parents coming down to the Portland area for a job or what did they do for ... What brought them back down to Portland? So I have an older brother who has a family and he lives in Cape Elizabeth as well. So it was really my mom just looking to be closer with family and her grandkids, my niece and nephew. But I think it was also just, yeah, it's being close with family and kind of having a new sense of community. And obviously Portland is incredible at that. There's a good culture here and I think it was just time to venture back out. Did either of your parents do anything in the arts? My mom is an artist. She paints or she used to paint. I'm trying to get her back into it, but now she just kind of lives vicariously through me and she's happy with that. And my grandmother, Nana, who my mom's mom was also a painter. And then my grandfather was a graphic designer. My mom was a graphic designer and so growing up, my parents had a sign shop together and so they would make signs. My mom was a designer, my dad would kind of handle the account side of things and the installations and I would help out here and there where, like I said, just go along for the ride to Portland or something. So that I think was an influence in itself. Their business was always on the home property. So if I got bored, I could just kind of go hang out in the shop and watch what they were doing. So it was never like pushed on me to be a graphic designer or an artist. It just kind of worked out that way. I went to school for graphic design and marketing. I think that was just because it felt comfortable because that's just what I grew up with too. So you went to Stetson and then your education was disrupted through COVID, is that right? I finished my degree at Stetson in Florida and I ended up staying in Deland, Florida for a little bit because I just had a good ... It's like a really small, great, old school Florida city. And I found some good friends there. I was also like a bartender and a barista on the same street, so I got to know the town really quick, like regulars in the morning and then in the evening. So it was a lot of fun, but it also felt like, all right, I can't really do what I want to do in this space. It just doesn't have enough to offer. And then I moved out to Portland, Oregon to kind of try my luck with my new graphic design degree because Portland, Oregon is like, it's like a design hub. There's a lot of big industries out there for that. A little naive about it because it's also like you need 10 years of experience to even be like a junior designer. So I was like, "Oh my gosh, what am I doing?" It was a little overwhelming, but I did find a pocket, found a local distillery out there. So I worked front of house as a bartender again, but also as a graphic designer for them, which was huge because I got a lot of experience. They gave me a lot of experience for that and kind of working with their brand, but that's when COVID hit and wasn't so fun out in the West Coast. It was pretty scary. So that kind of was like, all right, I need to get back to Maine and start over again. I'm glad I did. So I know COVID was terrible, but it was also like a helping hand in a way. Sounds like it maybe enabled you to refocus priorities perhaps. I think it was just like a reset. I still do graphic design, but coming back to Maine, I was able to find an opportunity to paint and that completely changed everything else now. So that's the big reason why I'm very thankful I came home, is to really reconnect with my passion. Talk to me about George Anderson and the impact that George has had on your life artistically. Yeah. So I mean, coming home from Portland, Oregon and back to Portland, Maine, it was really just kind of walking around looking for any job, going into bars, seeing if I could get another bartending gig or something. George has his, or had his studio gallery on Fourth Street, and so it was open. I popped in and just kind of a not your typical gallery studio space. It's an old studio, an old building, and it's just got paintings kind of stacked and lined up along the wall, but lots of color, just an explosion of color walking in. And it's very simplified landscapes or Portland scenes. And so it kind of hit home and made me think of, it's very graphic design oriented. So he started talking and he owned an ad agency for a long time. And so he hit it off about design and about art and we're talking for like an hour. I showed him some of my paintings in the last few years at the time and he loved it and then he kind of just offered me a job. George is also like 92 years old at this point, so he was offering me a job in the sense like he needs help keeping the door open. He doesn't want to be there all day, every day, understandably. And it worked out as a great opportunity for me to use his studio and just paint every day. So that was a huge help. Just having a space to paint every day changed a lot for me. I was kind of able to find my style after a little while. I was doing a lot of like realism before and being surrounded by George's work was definitely an influence to kind of loosen up a little bit. And yeah, if you go back on and look at my old work, you can kind of see how it graduates into different avenues into what it is now. But yeah, I mean, George was, he was a mentor. I was there for two years and then another half a year after that. So within four years, we worked together quite a bit. Yeah, he was big for me. One of the things that I've been noticing about the Portland Art Gallery is that it's an interesting ... It really has artists of every part of the spectrum, age wise, experience wise, educational background wise. And I kind of love being a fly on the wall and standing in the gallery and not intentionally, I just can't help it, but overhearing conversations between artists because you can be an artist who has been practicing for two years, you can be a practicing artist for, I don't know, 50 years, and you can actually learn from one another on both sides. It's not just the people who have been around for a long time, teaching people who haven't been doing it quite as ... Tell me about your experience. It's a very unique community in that sense. And that's why I think I love talking to other artists is just because their experience, like you said, they could be doing it for a long time. And what does that look like over the years as far as, have you always done the same thing or what were you doing 10 years ago compared to now? And I don't think I'm going to be painting the same 10 years from now. I hope I'm a better painter, but those conversations are fun to kind of dissect and just learn other people's processes and yeah, it's interesting. You and I were talking a little bit about your process and I've become really interested in process recently because to be able to take a concept from your mind to reality requires actual skill, craft. So it doesn't magically like, here's the canvas, here's the panel, and take some acrylics, just splash them on there. I mean, it actually takes practice, it takes skill. And you were describing your process to me. Is this something that you ... Well, first of all, would you mind sharing with people who are listening what your current process is? Yeah. I'm very much a studio painter. I think I tried Plein Air once, but it was too windy and wind is like an absolute killer when you're outside painting. So that kind of like discouraged me. But I take pictures a lot, but I take pictures like I was going to paint something. So I'm already kind of thinking about composition and how I like to paint something is how I take pictures of whatever I'm looking at. My process now is working in a studio from photographs and really starting with an illustration on a big canvas and it's very illustrative forward from start to finish. So I think I start with like a pencil sketch and then I go over and get like my final lines that I really want to show through with charcoal. I spray that, so it's not going to smudge or anything. And then I do an underpainting, so I get like one color over the whole canvas, but that those lines of charcoal are still showing through. So once that's all dry, then I'll start painting with oils and filling in those lines. But that illustration is coming through until the end. Which sounds like it very much aligns with the way that you used to engage artistically with the world when you were younger, because you said you've been drawing for a long time. So it's interesting to me that you're now painting, but you're still incorporating drawing into the way that you're approaching things. Yeah. I think it's partly I didn't really go to school for painting, and so you kind of figure out, like you're not taught a certain way to do something. You kind of figure out your own way of doing something, and I think that's special. Not to knock any art schools or anybody that's been to art school, but I think that's an opportunity to kind of create your own process and not be told how to do something. And I think that's a good quality. Well, having spoken to ... I mean, you're a good company as far as graphic designers who also are doing a different version of art. I mean, Annie Darling is one, Ann Trainor Domingue is another one within our gallery and Andrew Faulkner, they all have this sort of graphic design background, but it is interesting that it's a different ... You're starting from kind of a different educational place, a different experiential place, and you're evolving the way that you're incorporating art based on your education and experience, but it's coming out in a slightly different way than if somebody was perhaps classically trained as a painter. I definitely, like I said, I did realism for a little while and I think the more ... It's an incredible skill to have, and I think it allows me to kind of loosen up, but I like that I went for it and learned from it, but the more I tried to make something realistic, the less it felt like it was mine, in a sense. And so when I ... I mean, it takes ... It sounds funny and backwards, but there's a certain discipline in letting yourself loosen up in the process. And when I was able to finally do that, and that takes a lot of practice and time, but that's when I was like, "Okay, this feels like me. This feels like this is my work and I can really figure out something that is mine in a sense." So as you're talking, I'm thinking about this idea of your kind of artistic voice and I don't know what the ... I mean, voice is something that comes from other elements of my background, but is there an artistic imprint? I mean, is there something that artists consider to be their way of doing something that kind of shows that these are their pieces that are showing up in the world that is different than the word voice? Yes, but also there's no true originality either. Everybody's taking something from somebody. I have my favorites that I pull a lot of inspiration from. I'm not trying to copy anybody, but you can't say it doesn't look like these artists from a hundred years ago, they're clearly inspiring something in me. But yeah, I think you still find your own voice, but it's on the backs of others that have done something similar in the past. Yeah. I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, even when ... I've done a lot of reading about the history of color, for example, and we've been thinking about colors and color pigments and they've been evolving different types of color theory for thousands of years now, whether formally or informally. So even just color, and that's just one element of art has got such a deep historical background that even if you're not intentionally saying, "Oh, I'm going to go do this the way that a specific color theorist is approaching this, " you're still kind of absorbing Same things as you're paying attention to what they're putting out into the world. So that makes sense to me the way you're describing it. But you're also describing this way of, I don't know, fitting these different elements together and fitting the process in to kind of underpin the elements you're describing to come up with where you are now. So I guess that's where I'm wondering if this voice, this kind of constellation of things, you feel like you've kind of settled in in a way to where you want to be, at least for now. I think so. I'm happy with the direction I'm going in. When I was at George's studio and painting every day, it was you're sitting in a perfect studio with the opportunity to do something. And so I would feel guilty if I wasn't, but in that same sense, it's just not going to be on all the time. And so sometimes you just have to look at a white canvas for a day until you're ready to do something. But those years were very experimental. And like I said, kind of working my way out of realism, kind of abstracting landscapes, like what's working, what's not working. There was one thing that kind of clicked where like the night before I was playing video games or something and it was The Last of Us, which is like this apocalypse adventure game. But there was kind of a scene where the trees were very blocky and at night and it was just a cool look. And so I took a picture of the TV and then brought that into the studio and kind of just tried to paint that. And that kind of started this whole, I don't know, this whole like abstract tree thing that I've been doing. And when George saw it, he's like, "This looks a lot like AJ Casson who's part of the group of seven, who's now one of my favorite artists, but I had no idea who he was or who the group was. " And I was like, "Holy crap, this is actually very similar to something a hundred years ago." So it was just kind of a funny turn of events to find inspiration in a video game and then kind of connect it to an artist from that time period. Yeah. So that was fun. And does it make you wonder if the person who was designing the video game somehow had, I don't know, an experience with AJ Casson and said, "Oh." No, I think that's just how I painted something that was already graphic. It was already an interpretation of a landscape in the video game, but then I take it from that and then interpretate it in my own way. And then that has been one of the continuing features in my paintings is kind of these blocky landscapes and- Which is interesting because again, going back to what we were talking about before with kind of the circular elements in the wood pile, I mean, those seem a lot less blocky. I mean, just by the very nature, I guess. There are some elements of, if I'm remembering correctly, more linear elements that are associated with that piece, but there's a lot of circles in that piece. Do you feel like this is an evolution for you or it's just another version of kind of where you are right now? I think it's in line. I'm not sure what ... It's not like I have an idea of what's coming next, but the way I paint things is very like front and center and I like the detail for like the subject being front and center and then whatever it is in the background, having some sort of depth. But I mean, you look at a lot of my work and there's always, the subject is like right in the middle. And for this piece, it is still in the middle, but it's like kind of taking up from one side to the other instead of it ... I don't know. The subject is almost the whole painting instead of it being kind of isolated in the middle in a sense. So I mean, it worked. Hopefully that goes into the next one and we'll see where it goes from there. Well, I appreciate your having this conversation with me and I appreciate your talking with me about process because I think it's, as I've gotten more interested in art through talking to artists, it just makes me more curious about the craft and the way people's minds work. And everybody's so very different. So you've given me yet another perspective into an artist's mind and I appreciate that. Well, thank you. This was a great conversation. I appreciate it, I've been speaking with artist James Mattison. He is one of the newest artists with the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. If you want to see his work, I actually encourage you to go in person. I mean, his work looks great online, but I can attest to the fact that it looks really spectacular when you're right in front of it, but I suspect we're going to be seeing a lot from James Madison. And I also encourage you to come visit on first Thursdays because you tend to be there quite a bit. So if people want to ... Yes. If people want to meet James Mattison, then please do come to our first Thursday art openings at the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. And James, thanks again for being with us. Thank you, Lisa. My pleasure.