Matthew Rucker

We live in a loud, busy and chaotic world. Someone or something is fighting for our attention at every turn. Every frame of our vision is crammed with so much stimuli, it’s hard to know what to look at – what to see. It’s hard to find peace. My paintings are my response to that chaos

Balance is a series of hyperminimalist (hyperrealism + minimalism) oil paintings that embrace simplicity, lightness and tranquility. These paintings are designed to be easy on both the eye and the mind. Each painting features a large area of ambient space in a gentle gradation of a soft pastel or tinted grey*. This eliminates context, setting, and the noise of a background, and instead creates a neutral setting for the painting’s subject.

These paintings emerge as a result of my own search for peace, but they are also very personal to me. The singular subject in each painting is a portrait of someone dear to me.

The animal/subject is chosen before I choose the person it will represent – not the other way around. Once I’ve sketched an image onto the canvas and my palette is prepared, I then decide ‘who’ the painting will be. Some are self-portraits, some depict my dog as something other than a dog, but most are portraits of close friends and family.

Once I choose someone (or a specific aspect of someone) I focus only on that person and my positive feelings for them the entire time I put brush to canvas. This way, I am able to transfer my feelings towards that person onto the canvas, adding a significant amount of emotional and personal content to each painting.

* I am severely colorblind. I see about 1% of the colors a person with normal color vision can see. I “feel” color on an emotional level instead. These backgrounds are experiments in color mixing and are not pre-planned. I mix unusual color combinations on the palette until the color feels right. Like a musician trying to find the perfect note to complement a song, I won’t begin painting until the color sings to me.