Love Letters to the Road - Page 2

Matt has had a complex relationship with Disneyland, one that continues to this day with his wife, Celestina Barbosa, whom he met while both were working at Disneyland in the 1990s.

They have visited with their sons, who are 9 and 11. Today the family lives in Liberty Lake, Washington, near Spokane and the Idaho state line.

In addition to being influenced by animators and artists who worked for Disney—including Mary Blair and Ward Kimball, among many other influences—Matt worked at the park for almost ten years, including a stint as "a wise-cracking jungle cruise skipper," he once wrote.

The pay was "peanuts," he says, but the experience made up for it. "I lived right across the street from the park," he says, so saw it all—the families from every corner of the earth who visited the park, and the neighborhood of once-glorious neon-bedecked motels, where he and his family used to stay, that by the 1990s had become squalid.

As artists go, Matt is as unpretentious as they come. Does his art send a message? Deal with social issues? Evince a philosophy?

Well, yes, if your philosophy is to indulge your passions for cool mid-century style in a way that will cause other fans to salivate.

"When you're passionate about something, and you're artistically inclined, that passion tends to be captured in your artistic output," says author and preservationist Heather David about Matt and his work.

Heather has several of his original works on her own walls, and has brought Matt in to help preservation campaigns she has headed, including to save San Jose Century Dome theaters. About his work for that campaign, an image of the theaters that ran on T-shirts, totes, and more, and "it really set the tone for the campaign," she says. "He just captured it, right out of the gate."

"He's a true artist," she says. "He doesn't do the art to make a living. It's from his heart."

When Matt had a retrospective of his work back in 2010, a writer for the Washington State Insider wrote: "Meticulously rendered in gouache and acrylic, Leiker's paintings strip away extraneous detail to create what are essentially tributes to mid-century leisure culture and the playful commercial design that helped define it."

Speaking of his own work, Matt told one reporter it presents a "very idealized" version of a place and time he loved. "In my art everyone is having fun," Matt said. "That's what I mean by 'idealized.'"

"My art is designed to make people happy, to have something fun and playful to look at and go like, oh, yeah, I recognize that. And it makes me feel good, and the colors are pleasant," he says.

Matt's early work, which he signed 'Mateo,' plays up what was perfect-o about the futuristic designs of the '50s and '60s, while 'the realities' of what life back then amounted to are bypassed with nary a mention.

But not without a thought.

"My art has never aspired to any lofty, political, or even intellectual goal. My primary objective has always been to simply make something enjoyable to look at," Matt writes.