A reader inquires as to whether Matt has ever considered turning his figurative characters and spirits into a digital video or cartoon.

Matt responds:

I believe life is a cartoon.  We all think we’re the kings and queens roaming around, master of all we survey.  The figures in my paintings talk with us, sing with us, laugh with us, mock us, criticize and praise us—they do all the things we do, either consciously or subconsciously.  I think the whole thing is a cartoon, but I have sort of a strange philosophy about everything I read or see.

Every day I peruse a couple newspapers, and it seems that the only thing that makes any sense are the cartoons.  It’s good to laugh and cry and envy and have joy with the cartoons in the paper, but the reality, to me, of the whole of existence, is that we are all characters in one big strange wonderful scary cartoon that we call life.  I’m waiting for the Looney Toons and Merry Melodies, “The End.”  I hope there’s a rainbow after that!

In terms of actually making a cartoon, the closest I ever came to that was a hand-made, limited edition book called Diary Pages, where the characters actually did speak.  It was a study of irony and self-examination, but it could very well be looked at as a set of cartoons.

Matt

[Editor’s note:  Next week we will post some of the whimsical, ironic captions from the Diary Pages.]