Let it Float: A studio visit with Matt Coombs

- Van Jazmin is a designer with a passion for leadership, community and transformation. He has collaborated on projects with Cirque du Soleil, Tervis Tumbler, TEDx and the Ringling College Center for Applied Creativity and Innovation. His contributions to Sarasota’s creativity include graphic facilitation with Your Creative Ideas and launching Clothesline Print & Design, an artist-run screen printing company.The "one-hit wonder" phenomenon not only applies to musicians, but visual artists as well. Locally speaking, there have been dozens of artists each year who get their 15 minutes of fame in a flash-in-the-pan solo exhibit---only to fade into distant memory. Matt Coombs is not one of them. His most recent exhibition and third one-man show to date, Let It Float (closing March 30), is an example of the artist's ability to continue to produce new and exciting bodies of work.

An undergraduate in the Fine Arts Department of Ringling College of Art and Design, Coombs recently returned from the New York Studio Residency Program (NYSRP), where he stopped painting and found a renewed interest in drawing and collage. This shift opened up a new mode of thinking, which has found its way back into painting.

Curious to learn more about this experimental approach, I arranged to meet Coombs in his Sarasota studio. There, I observed the vast white space with his buckets of turpentine, cans of Titanium White and freshly brewed black coffee (the latter which may be a common staple of working artists). He led the way on skateboard to the opposite end of the studio, in which his handmade frames were drying in the spray booth. After another layer of white enamel, we were ready to sit down for a Q&A.

What was your experience like at the New York Studio Residency Program?

I saw a lot more art than I'm used to [seeing] around here. It's rare to view a huge amount of contemporary art in the space that it's meant for. So that was the first priority: to see a lot of galleries, a lot of shows, and really study things like how each gallery is different and how they support each artist differently, and how they choose their artists.

It was interesting to work in a community of artists because I'm usually sort of adrift, in which I come into some kind of community with my work and discuss it---and usually go back into my studio alone. This was like a constant social sphere mixed with working sphere ... so it's a total immersion in conversation.

Why did you stop painting during that time?

I think the new work is a by-product of changing questions and changing ideas about what art should be. I was raising questions, which is what made me stop painting toward the end of the semester in New York. I started asking these questions and the art couldn't keep up. I could be halfway through a painting, and could have seven more questions about why am I even doing this---is this better than nothing at all?---very important questions, because all that comes from a place of trying to figure out the meaning of painting today.

I had to stop painting with no intentions to necessarily go back to painting. I wanted to learn to see in a new way, find out what painting doesn't do. I also needed to keep making work at the pace that I was shedding my skin, and the only way I could do that was to make drawings and collages, and that helped me move through ideas very quickly.

Was it an experimental period for you?

Very.How is your current studio compared to your studio in New York?

I was working with people. Here, there's not many people working at the same time. There were always people around [in New York]. You're in a performative mode---it's very different. It's hard to find that space for quiet contemplation. I don't think it's the place for that. It was the place for being bombarded by information sorted out later. I think I came to port, had all my communications with the world, now I've come back to withdraw again and sort it all out.

How does your current studio environment affect your work?

It's so empty … that it just becomes a psychological space. This big empty studio is just a place where I can throw an idea down the hallway like a tennis ball and have it bounce back a minute later. I can have this space to let my ideas expand in a private way.

Describe a typical day. When do you get up and start working?

There is no typical day. I do have a routine to some extent … when I'm not in show preparation mode, I try to just work as much as I can and I tend to work evenings. I get to the studio around noon or 2 p.m. and do all my business, but my real best working time is 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. It's also because it's dark, private and quiet. Not in any romantic sense … but I like to focus.

While you're working, do you listen to any kind of music or talks? 

I always have some sort of background sound. I listen to television or news, or anything that's dialogue-based. If anything, I will pick something that I don't see any relevance to my work. It's a good chance to multi-task. I listen to audiobooks. There's only certain amount of hours a day, so it's good to get some nonfiction in your thinking about the work. Usually it's something I've heard before, so it doesn't have an overwhelming entertainment value where I can't think about the work.

In what ways do you stretch yourself? How do you continue to make your work grow?

I've never been a person who wanted to make the same painting twice. I don't want to be the guy who paints  ____. Damien Hirst paints spots and puts animals in glass boxes (and says a lot of crazy things). The main effort has been not to settle on something and keep pushing forward and adding to the vocabulary of imagery that I draw upon. Now I force myself to go back the other way and make a focus group of work that ties together the experimental parts of my development. I think that for the first time, this is a gathering of ideas that serve more for the work to come than for any sort of accomplishment.

But if I say in my mind that this is my strongest work, there's no impetus to make more work. Maybe in the way that Matthew Barney will make performances and video to frame up sculpture in a physical setting ... I create a body of work and see it exhibited as a way to frame my own mental image of my own visual vocabulary. So an exhibition for me is mostly a self-examination of my choices. That keeps me in a state where it's never finished, always growing.

I've noticed that you've gone down in scale from previous work, but maintained certain qualities. Do you have any goals for this new series?

Yeah, this body of work has several drawings and collages from the period when I stopped painting, probably December 2012 through the end of January. Those were made at the same time as I was making digital collages, so in both ways I was trying to step outside of my muscle memory of painting and deal with what kind of images I want to make. That was happening through winter, then I started printing off the digital collages. They're small, active, referencing big machines, maybe helicopters or boats or the surface of metal or fiberglass. That type of sensibility … that action and that reference to a large scale in a small, controlled scale was interesting to me, because number one---that may connect activities between paintings.

When it's not a full immersive environment where it's one big immersive painting---like a 16-foot painting---you take that as one experience and it has control. When it's small, you feel like you have control over it and you can frame up a couple in your sight at the same time, which implies there may be some activity working between the pieces. It also makes it feel like something seen from a distance---it could be something big from far away. It's also the way we see images right now---images all can be seen in that small scale … there's a strange familiarity with that, when you're holding the device that produces the image. You're used to manipulating that scale with your fingers, but then you put it on the wall. I decided to just take the sensibilities and sensations that came from these small things and asked, "What's the attitude of those?" And sought to transform that into painting, where it's more visceral.Do you care to share the reference or story behind the title of the show?

There's a couple reasons I like that title. I think the central one is an almost comedic sense of ambivalence. And I think the title can only be framed within the context of how the images feel in terms of their attitude---they're almost light-hearted. The title came from a joke this philosopher told about that Anglo-Saxon, ambivalent, liberal, democracy-type spirit. It's just one way to view the world.

Is there something guiding your work, or another reason why you continue making work?

The reason I continue to make work is because there are endless amounts of things that we haven't seen. I always like to phrase the question myself: "What do I want to see?" or "What do I want to put in front of my own face?" What combination of approaches can bring me something closer to how I feel or sense myself or my own life? And that's what keeps me going. As hopeless as that seems in language, the more you work, the more you realize that there are certain things that an image can do to your body and your ways of sensing the world that extend anything that language can do. That's why I paint and don't write books.

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See Matt Coombs' latest exhibit, "Let it Float," on display through March 30 at Clothesline Gallery. Clothesline is located at 529 S. Pineapple Ave., Sarasota, FL 34236. For more information, call 941-366-522 or email [email protected].