W&N materials used
Artists' Oil Colour,
Winton Oil Colour
About Matt Held
Matt Held was born in Denver, Co. in 1971. He attended Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design before moving to Seattle in 1996. He proceeded to develop his art while working many thankless jobs such as bicycle courier, warehouseman, and go-get-it-boy at large before meeting his wife, having a baby and moving to New York where he now focuses full-time on his art. He currently lives with his family in Brooklyn.
Watch Winsor & Newton's Resident Artist Jimmy Leslie interview with Matt Held in his studio in December 2009.
Matt Held's Work
Matt Held's work focuses on taking images of social media users and transforming them into a classic form of painting-portraiture. By sourcing his subjects from a digital city, Matt calls into question our assumptions about identity, how we shape our online selves for others to see. In the process, his work transforms the physical and digital self into something more contextual, and well, more fun.
Matt has used Winsor & Newton oil paints almost exclusively since art school "I work with a very limited palette of colors so being able to achieve variation with tone and texture is really important to me. Winsor & Newton either Artists' Oil Colour or Winton Oil Colour has always been consistent in helping me achieve a level of vibrancy I feel makes each painting I work on so distinct."
A recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Council/ New York City Department of Cultural Affairs 2010 Regrant program, Matt's project "I'll have my Facebook portrait painted by Matt Held" has been featured on Art Fag City, Modern Art Notes, Two Coats of Paint, Juxtapoz online, New York Magazine, "The New York Observer", "The Daily News", numerous German, Austrian, and Swiss publications including Spreeblick, Focus Online, Jetze, Myself, Sleek Mag, derStandard, ZeitZuender and Italian culture blog, Polkadot.
Matt was also the featured artist at the Brooklyn Art Museum's 1stFans group in March 2009 and a panelist for "Big Love - Artists and Social Networking" at Haskins Laboratories at Yale University, New Haven, CT in May of 2009. He and his wife also maintain the "Portrait Painted blog", a site dedicated to chronicling the Facebook painting project and other social media/modern art musings.
For further information on Matt Held visit:
www.heldstudios.com