Artistaday.com - Find new contemporary art, create your own gallery of art
Artistaday.com - Find new contemporary art, create your own gallery of art

Matthew Grabelsky  New York, NY

'Alexandra & Mr. Guar'
Oil on Panel
'6 to Brooklyn Bridge'
Oil on Panel

* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.


About Matthew


A native New Yorker, Matthew graduated from Rice University in 2002 with a BA in Art and Art History and a BS in Astrophysics. Afterwards, he moved to Florence, Italy, where he spent four years studying the techniques of classical drawing and painting.

Matthew explains his work by saying, “Science taught me how to observe the world, and art has allowed me to express my relationship to it. Since 2006, I have focused on creating paintings that combine the physical world that people see every day with imagery from mythology and dreams. My work is not intended to be viewed as fantasy or as allegory, but rather as a blend of every-day experiences and the subconscious. My paintings are enigmatic, and they create dream-like worlds that invite viewers to form their own interpretations of the imagery presented. I paint in a highly realistic manner, derived from my studies of 19th-century French Academic painters, and I use this visual language to craft modern narratives. I place my subjects in urban settings: trains, gritty alleyways, and cosmopolitan cityscapes; then introduce a twist to create a mix of rational and irrational elements. My work is often humorous, and it straddles the divide between the serious and the bizarre.”


Matthew appears in the following Top 10 lists


'Twitterers'

'New York'

'#Instagram'

'2015'


10 of 11 reactions displayed


"Your pictures are breathtaking. How do you apply your oil paint in such a manner that one can not seeany brush stroke ? Do you mix your oil paint with some other ingredient.Your studies were done in Florence, do you had an artist which you studied specifically for this extremeRealismus ?Thank you und freundliche Grüße, Gabriele"

"LOVE IT"

"beauty and the beast...."

"it is magicacl and a small canalope"

"Brilliant!"

"dope arts!"

"I love these - Matthew invites us to form our own interpretations - for me, it's all about xenophobia or prejudice on the part of the viewer, and the lack of it on the part of the seated person. I'm seeing this because I was reading an interview of Toni Morrison yesterday, and she felt that for a lot of white people, black slaves wanting to be equal was how we would feel if horses suddenly wanted equality, to sit on buses next to us, etc."

"Love it!"

"Absolutely love this."

"very personal"


Previous artist


artistaday instagram artistaday pinterest