Matthew Bird

Matthew Bird is a watercolor painter based in the Baltimore area whose primary subjects are still life, portraits and figures. When I first glanced at the page of still life images on his website, I thought he was painting in a deliberattely high-chroma manner. Once I started to look through, I realized he was actually painting quite true to nature, simply choosing colorful subjects, arranging them against generally dark backgrounds, and lighting them effectively. Something that’s not mentioned often enough when discussing still life painting is the aspect of the art involving the arrangement of the objects. Yes, this is composition, but it’s a stage of composition that is physical and different from similar concerns of compositional placement in landscape. Bird’s arrangents are often thematic, and usually involve a number of objects related to food, The resulting paintings, with their dark backgrounds, carry echoes of classical Dutch still life, but with a modern color sensibility.…