All About Me: Matt Aston's Self-Portraits

Behind the stage at a small theater in downtown Los Angeles, Matt Aston’s shadow is projected on scrim. He has horns and a tail.  He is some kind of non-specific mythical being, a vaguely rural deity with New World overtones about to be consumed by his carnivorous brother in the climactic scene of the world premier of  “Tiny Trumpets,” a new play by Padua Playwrights veteran Heidi Darchuk, for which Aston also designed the set.

The moment is engorged with meaning for Aston, an artist with strong ties to the theater whose themes range from heroic images of the American West to masterful explorations of post-modern presentational styles in a series of ironic self-portraits.

He is a larger-than life guy, and maybe he needs the extra bulk to contain the contradictions of a good old boy from Texas working in Los Angeles, a former teacher of theater arts who is a self-taught painter and a refugee from the Bible Belt with dark but rarely expressed (thankfully) suspicions about black helicopters.

Aston is on something of a high at the moment. Early in 2008, he unveiled a massive self-portrait that dominated a group show at the Center for the Arts in Pomona. It is a devastatingly exact likeness emerging from a seemingly random abstract mass of line and color. It represented a true breakthrough, the culmination of years of work in which he has struggled to reconcile abstract and representational approaches. Since then he has produced a whole series of portraits and self-portraits that are truly amazing in the seeming ease in which faces laden with character emerge from masses of line and color, the result of a process that seems as unforced as a natural process.

Aston’s self portraits are now on display in a one-man Show at 410 Boyd in downtown L.A. Recently, Aston explained how he made the transition from theater to the plastic arts:

“I was teaching theater at Central State University in Oklahoma and going to the late John Bishop's play-writing class on Monday nights and he said if you could write a successful play that was a biography then you could write anything. So I started, after reading every biography of Pollock I could get my hands on, (this was in '92 long before the Ed Harris film) to write a play -- then thought how cinematic the story was, moved to L.A. and the sixty hand written pages I had in a briefcase were stolen out of my truck along with B.H. Friedman's book on Pollock."

"But all this time, like a method actor, I was pouring, dribbling and splattering paint on canvases laid on the floor. So with the discouragement of the lost writing and the fact that I was now creating my own original paintings I thought "Do I want to write about an artist or BE an artist?" Which is really, do I want to write or paint? "I was so possessed by Pollock that one of my first paintings turned out to be a portrait of the picture from the cover of the Steven Naifeh – Gregory White Smith biography (Jackson Pollock: An American Saga)."

"Now that I am in LA, I had to make a living and one of my first assignments was to go to New York and paint "Top of the World" -- the observation deck atop World Trade Center 2 where tourists would pay ten bucks to go to the top. This was in '97 -- after the first bombing -- so every day for three weeks I would go thru security checks. So I'm at this bar, La Pescado, drinkin' and badmouthing Warhol (a view that changed when I saw the MOCA show) -- I have no idea where I am and the guy next to me says ‘who do you like’ and I say, ‘Chuck Close.’ He says, ‘I'll introduce you, I'm goin' to his place on Tuesday.’ The guy turns out to be Close's neighbor, abstract expressionist Jan Frank. So when I get back to LA, I paint this portrait of my dog Buddy using the Close method and of-course a large self-portrait because it is all about me."

“It’s All About Me,” a one-man show of ”Matt Aston’s work, is on display through January 15 at 410 Boyd Street, 213-617-2491. Hours: Mon.-Fri., 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; Tue- Fri, 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m.

Matt Aston’s work will also be on display in the foyer of the ArtShare theater during his run as ‘Miller’ in “Tiny Trumpets,” one of three original one-act plays presented as “The Neo-Sacred Revival” by Padua Playwrights at Art Share L.A., 801 East 4th Place, 90013, January 23rd through February 15th, 2009, Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings at 8:00 p.m.

Call (213)625-1766 for reservations. To see more of Aston’s work or to enquire about commissioning a portrait, see mattaston.com