Love Letters to the Road - Page 3

"However, if there is one reoccurring theme through most of my work, it is the celebration of 'the promise' or 'the ideal.' For a country just emerging from the Second World War, 'the promise' of something better was a motivating constant, and evidence of that can be seen in nearly all mid-century advertising and much of the era's commercial architecture."

"Even though the realities behind that optimism quite often fell short," he adds, "my art nevertheless has sought to celebrate that 'promise,' even in acts of the mundane and the trivial:

"We're going bowling, and it's gonna be great! We're going shopping, and it's gonna be great! We're gonna have a barbecue, and it's gonna be great! We're gonna lay around the pool, and it's gonna be great! We're gonna hit the road, and it's gonna be great!"

But is Matt's art as lightweight as all that? It may look it, at a glance. But tie it to his life story, and the sadness at the fate of the motels and Googie coffee shops that defined his childhood and inspired his career since, and the picture darkens.

Those motels that once created lively strips of light and fantasy in and around Anaheim? "Gone, gone, gone," Heather says.

"The themes [of the motels] were extensions of the themes within Disneyland," Heather says, citing Peter Pan and Tomorrowland, "and the signs were just incredible. No two motels were alike."

"They had to compete to be the most eye-catching," she adds.

But when Matt returned to Anaheim as a young adult to work at the theme park, he says, the "once fantastic motels were now quite sketchy."

"As a 19-year-old kid, I could tell that these places had been amazing when they were first built, but that their heyday had clearly long since passed," Matt says.

"Towards the end of the [1990s] decade, when word was out that all these places' days were numbered, I actually went around Anaheim and photographed as many of them as I could. This was all pre-Internet, so I was really just satisfying my own obsession with preserving the memory of them."

Matt remembers when "the first wrecking ball arrived" to take down one after another motel, and he watched as a fabulous freestanding sign was hauled to the junkyard. Other once-classic motels still stand in Anaheim, but they have been remodeled out of existence.

Heather David says, "I think that Matt gets what Walt Disney was originally aiming to do, to give everyday people a taste of magic. So much of the Disneyland magic is gone for me, like the 50 or so whimsical mom-and-pop motels that once surrounded the park. But Matt captures this magic in his work."

About his career as an artist, Matt says, "It's my main preoccupation after being a dad."

"I'm a stay-at-home dad," working from a home studio, he says. "My wife is Vice Chancellor for Research at WSU Spokane. So she's out of the house every day."

In recent years, Matt's work has changed, still sticking with cool retro themes, but changing in materials, technique, and emotional tone.

"My gradual move to a new way of working was sort of a slow, evolving…progression that started around 2012, after a decade or so of turning out the 'bright and shiny' retro cartoon narrative-type stuff," Matt writes.

"I found myself gradually desiring to find a way to incorporate a bit more weight and/or emotion into my work."