[ Soft piano music ]
(Matt) Life is so delicate.
If you can get your brain out of the monkey
mind of thinking about the past, the future, you know,
being somewhere else, and just actually
just absorb what you have in front of you.
You realize you are lucky. You are lucky.
You're so fortunate to have that moment.
Even if your foot hurts or your pancreas or whatever,
you're still lucky to be alive in this moment.
My name is Matt Cotten.
I came to Tucson 30 years ago to go to grad school.
U of A, to study painting?
I got really involved with the community, right away
there were two things going on in my art
pursuit, which was making paintings
and functioning as a grad student and a teacher.
And on the other hand, doing experimental performance
with puppets, costuming,
fire.
[ ■ Somber piano music ■ ]
(Sarah) I really think of Matt as a storyteller.
His paintings really inhabit this space
between telling a narrative and also giving you enough
abstraction and space and color and line and mark making
that isn't so literal that you can kind of like
fill in the story for yourself, which is what I really love.
(Matt) The less I can tell you, the more you have to project
your own thoughts and ideas into the painting to understand it.
Although I know that people love to hear from the artists
why it's this way
and what your influences and your inspirations were.
But it's almost like that■s secret stuff.
You don't get to know that.
So the subject of my paintings
is space and how humans interact with the space.
I am always interested in work that shows the process,
and so mine obviously shows the process.
I do like leaving the graphite
and the sort of raw almost gesso white here and there,
but also have layers that lead up to a rich, rich color
and some very suggestive space or something
really three dimensional.
Seeing layers in a painting suggests
the many moments in my life
that lead up to this point.
(Sarah) When he's in his studio, that is his sacred time.
That is like his time when he's really in his own world
and he just gets
to focus on on making and crafting. The painting
It's like then the piece can be presented to the world
and you can view it and it is what it is.
I'm not just some kind of mystic person
in my studio doing something that gets blown away
with the wind.
I'm making objects that don't go away so easily.
What do these objects mean to people?
Painting is about the things that it is not.
It's about space.
It's about movement.
It's about passage of time.
The lasting legacy of painting
is the rectangle.
Your viewers are looking at a rectangle right this moment.
This is the language of our existence.
I look at my
my growth as an artist, and part of that has always been
trying to break out of the rectangle to some degree.
So the cutouts are an effort to break the rectangle,
bring the figures out of the ground
and place them in architecture.
So I think it's an effort to get people
to think about the space that they're in.
[■ Upbeat music ■]
(Matt) I started puppeteering when I was a really little kid.
It's because I was a severe asthmatic in upstate New York,
in and out of the hospital all the time.
And I was in this oxygen tent for,
you know, many days in a row.
And so I would create voices and scenarios and narratives
and characters, which is something that
a lot of little kids do with a good imagination.
(Sarah) With the puppets,
the stories maybe are a little bit more literal,
but it becomes this live experience of
of interaction with people, with children, with adults.
It's like taking
this very internal process that he has
and then bringing it out to community.
Which is so beautiful.
(Matt) You jump to grad school
where I was just kind of yearning
for something more than just a gallery show.
And so I was getting involved with the local community
of underground artists that were doing experimental
performance in the streets, different stages around town
and so I started making puppets,
giant puppets
and getting into the traditions,
you know, various traditions from around the world
and exploring different kinds of puppetry.
For a long time, used papier maché.
Then the mice kept eating my puppets
when I put them into storage.
So I switched to other kinds of more synthetic glue.
So I still use paper.
I just don't use the flour anymore.
It's gluten free puppets now.
(Sarah) He's really an outside the box thinker.
He's never been satisfied with only being able to make art
that exists on a rectangle and hangs on the wall
and goes in a gallery or is in somebody's house.
I mean, that's wonderful.
But to him, he wanted something more.
(Matt) My painting is always evolving.
It's always changing.
My performance, my music, my puppetry.
It's always changing. My always looking for something.
Even though I've been in Tucson, been a homeboy
in Tucson for so long.
Within that context, I want to continuously
be discovering new stuff about my environment
and about what
is going on inside “me” head.
I'm hooked on screens just like everyone else, but
it's really important for me every day to step away from that
and go out and experience real space
and be actively involved in really
noticing everything about it.
The temperature or the walls around you or,
you know, the vast space in front of you.
Those are the things I experience when I walk.
I try to pay attention, try to get out of my head
and experience the world.
[ ■ Quiet soft music, fades out]