Continued from Part 1

Happy Lucky Panda Party

ike Beuys, Picasso and Kahlo before him, Sesow has turned tragedy into a language of icons; trauma scars, bunnies representing the innocence of his childhood, teacups (into which he funnels tempests–a symbol of control), the windsock from the runway, the one-winged phoenix. And like those artists Sesow has, out of an earth-shattering event, found himself with a powerful myth of origins, however sad and true, on which his artistic identity is based.

After the trauma of his childhood, Sesow went on to have a relatively normal life. With the support of his parents and peers, he played football and ran track in high school. He represented the US in the disabled Olympics in England as a teen. He received a MENSA scholarship to attend university in Oklahoma. And then he began a successful career in software engineering. By 1989 Sesow was living in Washington D.C. and working for IBM. But he had never thought about becoming an artist.

One day, in an attempt to impress a girl he liked, he started painting. He’d never gone to art school, but somehow he knew what to do. Surging images inspired by his accident flowed from his brush so naturally that he has not stopped to this day. To teach himself and to hone his raw talent, Sesow frequently visited the National Gallery of Art and other museums in Washington, trying to “backwards engineer the way the great painters did it.”

Birthday

“Software engineering,” he explains, “is about building programs by its components; interface, system utilities, installation.” Respectively, he sought to break down the way the artists that he admires–Picasso, de Kooning, Bacon, Basquiat and Dali, primarily–built their paintings.

But the atmosphere and feel of a Sesow painting are all his own. His compositions are so thrilling and haunting and many that they are collected all over the world. The first time he showed his work publicly (on the streets in Georgetown), he secured a five-year contract with an art agent. Locally his early champions were Baron and Ellin Gordon, the donors whose gift to Old Dominion University became its Self-Taught Art Gallery. Their attention led to shows at the Contemporary Art Center, Nancy Thomas Gallery and now, Mayer Fine Art.

Yet he is not one to bank on success. Sesow’s work is priced to be owned even by college students; at Mayer his most expensive painting (an enormous, commissioned canvas created live during an opera performance) costs $800, and the least expensive costs $80. He is, despite all, a working-man’s artist. His Socialist ideals play into his business model, and he sells maybe 90 percent of his work on the Internet. Part of his reasoning is simply because he is so prolific. He has never felt uninspired; his project 31 Days in July, for which he paints one canvas every day of the month based on the Washington Post’s front-page headlines, makes for him the easiest time of the year; and over the course of a 15-year career, he’s produced thousands of paintings.

Norfolk Terrier

“No matter how big you get,” says Sesow, “if you get the cover of Time, or if you’re shown at the Museum of Modern Art, you still have to make paintings.”

And from that ethos, Matt Sesow–like Picasso and Kahlo and Beuys–has created a magnificent body of work to contemplate the wars both inside and around him.

An exhibition of works by Matt Sesow is currently on view at Mayer Fine Art Gallery through November 7.

Click here to visit sesow.com and view more paintings by the artist. Or click here to read our preview and watch a clip from my interview with Matt Sesow.