Interview: Mat Ollig

Artist Mat Ollig

 

Local painter Mat Ollig is a bit of an anomaly. As a successful freelance artist, he seems to effortlessly sell artwork while maintaining his own personal style and dabbling in the experimental. While many artists rely on a second job to support their art, Mat quickly found that his art sales trumped the money coming in from his “real job” after graduating from MCAD. Establishing a unique, intimate rapport with collectors and appreciators of his art, Mat made the transition from screenprinter/designer to full-time, professional painter and has since created original artwork for the Hyatt Regency, the Millennium Hotel’s clubroom, CrashPlan software company Code42, and Omni Brewing as well as contributed a year-long display of several paintings in the Minnesota State Capitol’s Senate wing. 

I sat down with Mat in his studio in North Minneapolis to chat about taking chances with his artwork while keeping collectors happy and how he’s developed a lucrative career heavily based on commission work alone. And while his studio reads “artist,” with panels of finished and unfinished work floating above our heads, his demeanor falls more in line with a sales leader or marketing guru. Mat definitely knows how to sell his art.

 

Riveting the Banks of the Mississippi, oil on canvas, 52”x 65”

 

JE: While many artists rely on gallery representation to sell artwork and to gain recognition, exhibiting art in a gallery setting is not something you do with much frequency. At the same time, selling art doesn’t seem to be an issue for you. To what would you attribute this? 

MO: I’ve been really fond of biographies of the old artists and read about how they sold art before the modern gallery came about. They sold their work and formed relationships with collectors in a more personal fashion, and they would then in turn be referred to their collectors’ friends, and so on and so forth.

I took those lessons to heart, and found it easy to navigate amongst collectors. They would invite me over to their home and show me their collections, and I would invite them to my studio, and we would talk about my paintings. More often than not, they would leave my studio with one or two small paintings tucked under their arm.

JE: Your first commission, the one that “got the ball rolling,” came from someone who spotted your work online. Can you elaborate on that story? 

MO: My first break was with Ogletree Deakins - a Minneapolis law firm. They found one of my paintings on MCAD’s website and they contacted me. I actually honestly almost deleted [the email] because I thought it was a scam. It was this woman saying “Hi, I represent this law firm; we’re new and we love your work.” It sounded too good to be true. But I quickly Googled the person’s name and realized it wasn’t a scam. I did their lobby painting and they liked it so much, they asked if I could create the artwork for their entire office, and that just catapulted everything. 

JE: What do you think it is about your artwork that allows it that ubiquitous accessibility factor, something that can easily be displayed in corporate offices and high-trafficked spaces? 

MO: It’s not something you can instantly digest; you have to spend some time with it, but it’s definitely accessible. My new work is multidimensional with varying panels. I have a 14-foot dimensional painting with Code42 that has 23 individual canvases. It’s representational, but abstracted. I think that’s what corporate collections like. They have guests who come in and they’re waiting around and they want to be able to entertain them while they wait. People just enjoy looking at my art. 

Fracturing Space/Time, oil on canvas, 53''x53''

 

JE: Much of your artwork is an “ode to past accomplishments” that we’ve experienced either locally or on a worldwide level - our first lunar landing or the building of local architectural structures, for example. What draws you to create a visual retrospective of these historical moments? 

MO: Mainly because back then, everything was spectacle. I feel like there isn’t much spectacle on the grand scale anymore, everything is becoming smaller, thinner, waiting for the next update with the latest features. It’s harder to be more appreciative of it. Hearing the stories of what past generations did - building giant rockets, going to the moon, Zeppelins - I’m trying to invoke that feeling of accomplishment.

JE: Your newer paintings feature a series of fragmented pieces that when pieced together create a larger, complete composition. How did that experimental process come about? 

MO: For the longest time, I was starting to get bored with painting rectangles and squares. I had this idea that I wanted to create something that was more dimensional. I saw some work done by Gregory Euclide and his work is very dimension, with varying layers and I thought ‘how can I apply this to a painting.’ I don’t know if it was the pattern of argyle or if I was waiting for something to load on my computer with a slow connection and it just became fragmented, but it just kind of came to me one day. Using diamonds instead of squares, the work becomes more engaging and doesn’t just recede into the architecture; it becomes its own thing. By having the gaps in between the panels, it becomes more of an installation and sculptural, rather than just a two-dimensional piece. 

 

Godly Judgement Over the Waters, oil on canvas, 57”x 82”

 

JE: With this particular series, you explore the subjects in our collective conscious. The paintings portray the fragmentary nature of memories - related images overlap and boundaries cease to exist. What draws you to examine this concept? 

MO: I’ve done a lot of research on phenomenology and how we perceive the world around us and how that influences the way we see things. When we look at a painting, we’re not just taking in all in at once, we see fragments. Even when we see someone, it’s not the entire face; we create a mosaic based on the individual details. I wanted to create a painting that was more true to that, essentially paring down as much as I could and also adding as much as I could, in a contradictory but complementary manner. By overlaying the images, it’s creating more of a feeling of that image rather than just a visual depiction. A lot of my work before the dimensional pieces was about the inside and the outside of architecture and buildings, and it just becomes this experience. 

JE: Would you say that your personal work is creatively different from the work you’ve been commissioned to do or do they fall in the same bracket? 

MO: There’s definitely a difference. My personal work is a lot more experimental. I like to investigate how perception works. I like to think that I’m a “series artist.” I have the “Neo-Cubist Paintings” where I explore layering imagery over one another to create a narrative more akin to the way the viewer sees the world, and the result of exploring phenomenology and how it relates to the viewer’s experience of viewing the art. I focus on using compositional elements to keep the viewers’ eyes within the painting. These paintings appear both representational, yet abstract, and are my most popular paintings. 

Modern Café [RGB Prototype #14], oil on canvas, 24 x 30”

Then I have the “RGB Paintings,” a series of 24 “prototypes” investigating how to create full color images using only the colors that our retina can decipher: red, blue, green, and black (no color). I was turned on to this idea after reading Modern Chromatics by Ogden Rood, a book that inspired Seurat. I had to suspend this investigation, as I developed a repetitive stress injury in the length of my arm creating the thousands of hand painted hatch marks needed to create the effect. It took me seven years to create the right color green, and I’m currently waitlisted for the new YInMn Blue that will be available as soon as their EPA paperwork is filed. 

The “Multi-Panel Paintings” an extension of the Neo-Cubist series but investigating how to create paintings using the most minimal compositional elements possible, which, ironically, led to an incredibly complex composition. These paintings embrace their being art objects, rather than typical 2-dimensional art. They are in effect installation pieces and merge with their location in ways sculpture does and paintings typically don’t.  

For the “Dimensional Paintings,” which is the evolution of the “Multi-Panel Paintings,” I literally added a layer. This is the current series of paintings I’m exploring, and can be considered the same series as the Multi-Panel series. The sculptural nature of the paintings is becoming more heavily evident, and my latest painting has five layers of panels. This will continue until the paintings are able to literally leave the wall, and become free-standing painted sculpture.

“3D Encoded” is the most adventurous, scientific, and laborious of my series, being still in development. By using a concave lens’ chromatic aberration, which bends light like a prism, I noticed that some colors appear to dramatically advance, while others receded. This was discovered in a reducing lens; something artists used to make a painting look smaller, and easier to see when they were in front of it in a small studio. Ironically it’s beginning to show that classical color theory is holding true in allowing something to appear three-dimensional using color alone. Currently, I’m mapping out colors to determine their relative depth in relation to one another. It is essentially a more refined and detailed explanation of Hans Hoffman’s “push pull” theory of color. 

 

 

JE: As an MCAD alum, you often participate in the MCAD Art Sale. How would you say this event helps propel you as an artist and get a feel of what’s working and what’s still rough draft phase?

MO: It’s been a really good way to not have to worry so much about offending past collectors and has helped me hone in on my style. I found that the multi-layered technique which combines abstract and representational was the most popular, and honestly that’s the most fun style I like painting in. But I also use it to experiment with different styles of paintings. The RGB Paintings, for example, I premiered at the last show. I didn’t sell as many as I wanted to but I’ve been getting a lot of interest after the fact. I think it’s just a little too new. It’s a technique that no one else is really doing. 

JE: Any future projects we should be aware of? 

MO: My next big project will be finished by this fall. I have a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, and for that piece I’m going to be going to ten small town diners, scattered around the state, and creating artwork about the history of that diner. They’re not going to be historic diners per se, but the place where all the locals go, a multi-generational establishment and how they tie into local history. So, there’s this one diner out west on Highway 12 that Hubert Humphrey would have gone to because it was on his way to the cities, and I also found the last Embers in existence, which was a Minnesota company. Once I find the diners, I’ll create a painting that will be in the diner and there will be a postcard at the diner and a brochure showing all of the locations so people are going to have to go on an epic road trip to collect all ten postcards. 

 

You Can Dine in Your Car!, oil on canvas, 41”x 78”

See more of Mat's work on his website, http://www.matollig.com/

-- Juleana Enright
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