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Matt Altman
USA
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"I am aware, distracted, confused, passionate, and quietly competitive throughout."
Imperturbable yet aware, distracted yet driven, moderately confused yet quietly competitive, Matt Altman is a portrait assembled from characteristics that resist any easy reconciliation at all. The traits that serve him well and the traits that quietly trouble him were mixed and molded together across many long years, some of them distilled down to their essence and then patiently combined once more. Through that slow and deliberate chemistry they bonded and set over time, forming this man into precisely who he is today, a living composition in which the flattering and the flawed were never once separated but instead permanently fused into a single whole.
Gathering 1/3 | Acrylic
$7,000
36”x48”
Layers upon layers of emotion to create figures of feelings. Good feelings, bad feelings…. Feelings you didn’t even know were there. Feelings that bring you down or pick you up.
Some are numb to their feelings, but these figurative creatures are still lurking with us all.
The mixture, in fairness, leans considerably heavier on one side of the brain than the other, and he would be the very first to admit as much without a single trace of shame. His learning career held little that would impress a transcript or satisfy a teacher's careful file, and the road behind him is lined with countless paths and avenues that opened only into abysses. A man who carries curiosity of his particular strength is rarely ever safe from himself, and that restless appetite for knowing led him, again and again, straight into the exact kind of trouble that curiosity always seems to promise.
Brothers | Acrylic
NFS (Donated)
36”x48”
They are not biological brothers. They are brothers. They are aged. They are what species are destined to be. They are brothers.
"My curiosity runs deep enough to get me into trouble."
His journey first began on June 6th, 1984, on a Virginian naval base, where he was born while his parents were serving in the navy. The greater part of his early years dissolved into blur and slipped quietly from his memory, leaving only a few scattered fragments behind. What endured through all of it were the arts and music, the high points of his genuine interest, sustained by a mother and teachers whose steady encouragement built an early scaffolding of confidence in him. Yet even that foundation loosened, and as the years wore on, his hold on it faded, though the pull of creativity remained.
What Could Have Been | Acrylic
$5,000
36”x24”
A human being… female.
A mother to be.
Two lives taken.
Memories halted.
All that’s left is a perception of….
what could have been.
A great stretch of time passed before he finally managed to find his own footing again, and by then the accumulated toll on him was plainly and painfully visible to all. His mind and his perspectives had been beaten down to something closely resembling wet sludge, and the labor waiting in front of him now was slow reconstruction. He set about rebuilding himself out of knowledge earned and hard experience survived. His fascination with music and art had never once truly left his side. He moved in and out of memories of live concerts, each recollection stoking a quiet ambition to become something still undefined.
Gun smoke. Blood shed. A battle between two opponents…… even one’s mind and body. Mental health. The struggle is real.
Wartime | Acrylic
$5,000
24”x48”
"She approached me on a summer night, my birthday in fact, and love engulfed me, though whether she felt the same remained my anxious question."
"For years I moved through scattered work and forgotten paths, washing dishes and building trusses, rebuilding a mind that had been beaten down to sludge, never quite naming the thing I was reaching for. Then the drawings came, and my family filled the page, and that same material which had intruded into my brain and soul across a lifetime finally poured out of me in an expressive way. Standing there, engulfed by feeling I had never known, I understood that everything scattered and uncertain in me had been quietly assembling toward this, toward a man who could at last call himself artistic."
Marching | Acrylic
NFS (Donated)
30”x48”
We are all people. We all have conscious minds. We all are marching towards goals.
We are all human beings, but we are not the same.
Digital cartoons were rising heavily across the entire cultural scene throughout those years, and their steady ascent stirred a wish he had long carried without ever once announcing it aloud, the buried desire to become a cartoonist. What truly held him was not the antics of the characters but the background art woven quietly through those silly programs made for very young children. He came back to drawing, gathering tablets, digital pencils, and cartoon-making software in eager pursuit of the old spark. He had acquired every possible tool, and yet the feel remained stubbornly wrong, so the attempt closed, though his need for art refused.
Misfit | Acrylic
$2,000
24”x18”
A whispered indigenous cry will forever be a triumphant roar.
Throughout its scattered opening chapters, his early working life pulled him in many different directions at once without any unifying thread to hold it all together. He washed dishes and cooked in hot kitchens, delivered pizzas through the streets, and built trusses with his own two hands before fortune finally set a real opportunity before him. Landing in the trades, he began training in earnest to become a plumber, and the work delivered a structure his restless days had never before known. Within that steadying framework he felt a genuine maturing process take firm hold of him, yet he still sensed some ingredient was missing.
This fear is heard not seen. It’s sensed. You can’t touch it, but it is felt.
Fear | Acrylic
N/A
48”x30”
Then he met a girl, and she was beautiful in a way that quietly reordered the entire room, and the horizon before him tilted suddenly toward large and irreversible change. She was the one who approached him first, on a summer night that happened, with a novelist's precise timing, to fall directly upon his own birthday. Love engulfed him in a single overwhelming instant, though the question of whether she truly felt its equal hung above him, unanswered and deeply anxious. She was Anishinaabe, belonging to the very heritage he claimed as his own, and she loved both art and music exactly as he did.
"My drawings poured out and simply could not be stopped."
She loved him fully in return, and out of that quiet reciprocation an amazing relationship took shape and deepened steadily between the two of them over time. That bond was no small or incidental thing but the true imperative to much of the success awaiting them both, the single most important ingredient in the mixture that had been forming the man from his very beginning. He remains, even now, endlessly inquisitive about how something so beautiful and so profoundly meaningful could ever have entered a self so frequently lost, so often given to wandering, and so willing at times to overlook its own quiet needs.
Lighter Side | Acrylic
$5,000
24”x48”
Sometimes things just work out. Stress is wiped away. Good feelings are frequently present.
Beautiful and radiant and unmistakably his own, the children came next, and as they steadily grew before his watching eyes, art returned to him once again without ever being summoned at all. He could not stop himself from drawing his extravagant family, and though painting still eluded his hand and did not yet feel quite right, the drawings simply could not be stopped by anything. The old flood of feeling overtook him just as it had years before, carrying him bodily into a state near utopia, a sensation whose sheer intensity he had truly never once encountered anywhere before in his entire waking life.
The 2nd rendition of layered emotion transforming into figurative feelings.
Gathering 2/3 | Acrylic
$7,000
36”x48”
Matt Altman has traveled a genuine and deeply demanding journey, one that very likely carried far more weight than any single person should ever reasonably be asked to handle entirely alone. And yet his story stays deliberately untold in its true fullness, withholding nearly as much of itself as it ever chooses to reveal. It continues to expand day by day, quietly gathering new chapters as they steadily arrive. Its moral, much like the childhood buried somewhere beneath it, remains a genuine mystery still patiently waiting to be uncovered. What began as a scattered and uncertain self has slowly cohered into a man who now makes his entire life out of pure expression.
Matchstick | Acrylic
$2,000
16”x20”
Ignition. Plumes of smoke. Boxed in, surrounded, enclosed. Fresh air, not a guarantee. It's too much. This painting makes me suffocate.
"I weave through concert memories that once fueled my ambition."
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