MATTHEW RUNKLE
ARTIST STATEMENT

My work lives in a fascination for the essential and often hidden mechanics of objects and experience. I am compelled endlessly by the notion that simplicity orchestrated with precision is so typically the key to the moving, majestic, and profound. It is this motivation combined with the divergent yet overwhelming artistic influences of early non-representational painting and the American scene that drive me to combine the simplicity of modern abstract aesthetics with a stylized but clear reference to known objects creating a sense of time and place that is at once recognizable yet impossible to name. Through the studied orchestration of the nuances of this language it is my ambition to build the strongest emotional narrative from the simplest fundamental components.

"When we painters look at things, we do not see more than other people, we see less."
- R. Schmid