Love Letters to the Road - Page 4

"This eventually led me down the path to exploring hyperrealism with my trompe l'oeil acrylics, then onto pen and ink on wood, and most recently into the medium of collage," he adds.

While Matt has created art on the computer, most of his work has been painted with a brush. Now he is working in an even more tactile manner, creating artwork in a mosaic style using torn paper.

"I'm just tearing these tiny pieces of paper by hand and affixing them to a canvas and building the painting slowly that way," he says.

Matt's 'painting with paper' series can evoke places in decay, Googie objects that have seen better days, much as had the motels of Anaheim by the time Matt had returned there in the 1990s.

"When I walked to work at Disneyland, I would walk by the Eden Roc every day. When the sun was going down in the west, and the neon on that sign started to come on, and the little starbursts were chasing each other—to me it just looked magical.

"Now, granted, right below that sign there was some unsavory things going on…Many of those places had fallen into disrepair."

Matt got to know one young boy and his family, who were down on their luck and had to live in a once magical, now seedy motel, right in the shadow of Disneyland. The friendship affected Matt deeply.

"Meeting that family really opened my eyes to the idea that there are a lot of people that are really just trying to get by," he says. "They didn't do anything wrong. It's that maybe the playing field is not equal for everybody."

"For about the first ten to 12 years of my serious painting," Matt recalls, "my art sought to celebrate the promise that these motels, restaurants, shopping centers, recreational facilities, theme parks, and their accompanying promotional materials offered.

"Then gradually, I found my art turning more towards celebrating the realities of these places, even though age, time, shifting attitudes, and aesthetic tastes slowly left them behind. It's not meant as a dark or pessimistic view of anything, though."

About his newer works, Matt has written, "I do my best to conjure up feelings and emotions reminiscent of the old, aged, peeling paint 'ghost signs' that one might've encountered on the side of a store, motel, building, or a lone neglected billboard from days past."

"At the end of the day, my art—both the earlier and the later work—is a love letter," Matt says, to the retro designs and places he fell in love with on those childhood road trips.

• For more of Matt Leiker's art, search 'Matt Leiker' (under people) on his Flickr page, or contact him at [email protected].