Mat Brown is a very talented Toronto-based drawing artist, whose prints we are excited to now be carrying in our shop. His work is an insanely detailed blend of apocalyptic natural landscapes, brutal violence, and sometimes quite graphically erotic figuration. Reminiscent of the jam-packed scenes of old master painters such as Hieronymus Bosch  or Pieter Brugel, you could stare at any one of Brown’s pieces for hours and still come back later and find some interesting new detail sequestered away in a corner you hadn’t noticed before.

Below is a short interview we recently conducted with Mat about his recent exhibition with the MOCCA here in Toronto, and the extensive series of drawings he showed there entitled All Within  the Circle of Willis. Also if you are interested in seeing more of Mat Brown’s work come check his prints in our shop or go check out his website.

www.allwithinthecircleofwillis.com

I imagine that your pieces take a considerable amount of time to complete. What drives you to invest so much time and detail into each of your pieces? Also could you briefly describe the material processes behind one of your typical works?

MB: Although the works are small they incorporate a lot of layers of information, in this series mostly different types of animals and that time is mostly spent trying to decide what to include, as there are and have been so many variations on the form of life though-out time, mixed in are christian saints and references to various scientific debates over competing theories.  Technically the work is very simple, sketched out many times with pencil until there is a composition, drawn out in pink and brown ink on the matte board so that I can erase all the pencil before drawing over it in black ink..then coloured in like a colouring book, I try to stay within the lines.

From what I have been able to gather about your work, each of your pieces are inked and coloured in a way very similar to the process in which a comic page might be made. How strong an influence were comics for you growing up?

MB: I spent plenty of time in the comic store trenches as a kid, largely influenced by older stuff in heavy metal magazine, Moebius (Jean Giraud) and in the late 80’s early 90’s by all the manga/anime, from of course Akira (Katsuhiro Ottomo) to tank police (Masamune Shirow)etc…..so yeah a fair bit…..

When looking at your work, two aspects that immediately will jump out to most viewers is your interest in science and the natural world, as well as the often graphically violent and erotic events which are taking place. What repeatedly draws you back to these two realms of subject matter, and how do you feel they are related?

MB: I think when you boil it all down there is and can be really only one subject in art, the human experience. I think regardless of culture class or cognitive dissonance anyone over the age of (whatever) would agree that the human experience involves a lot more of the base drives like erotic passions or their bedfellows rage, insecurity and all the violence that accompany such parts of life, or the ignored violence that happens out of sight for the comfortable westerner, dominate the lives of the majority with far more influence than the rational higher levels of the human mind. I think that science and its progeny the droves of technologies we live with often blind us of the fact that real flesh and blood is being raped and eviscerated around the world to make it possible for us to pretend that those primal drives are a thing of the past. Those realms are not just related in my view, violence and sexuality are two sides of the same inner unconscious drives. (and because they feature so heavily in my worldview I think it would be dishonest to leave them out). 

I have heard that you are working on a book that will be released hopefully in the near future. Do you have any details on this project or any other future projects that would like to share?

MB: All within the circle of Willis- is a three part series that I’m currently working on. The first part (shown at the MOCCA, and in the prints) Is deep-time or ‘the past’ the second is human history from the dawn of man until the twenty first century ‘the present’ ( currently underway) and the third part ‘the future’. I would like to release just the first part, and I plan to, perhaps to a fault, I’m taking it pretty slow in completing the written component which I would like to be comparable to the images…..

You recently showed your massive series of drawings entitled, All Within the Circle of Willis, at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art here in Toronto. Each of the almost 30 pieces represents one the different periods in evolutionary history. Could you briefly describe the ideas and thought processes that led you to start such an enormous and amazing endeavour.

MB: The most basic motivation for this project was learning. I had worked for so long in what seems to be the most common vein in the visual arts, work focused mainly on personal aesthetics with a vague narrative really only understood by the artist. I wanted to pursue a long term project that would both teach me something, in this case the history of animal life and give me a framework for future work. I chose the deep history of the earth because it seemed like the most obvious and important foundation for what I believe artists should be engaged in, the critique of the culture that they are a part of. What I soon realized in the research for this work was the often overlooked aspect of ‘science fact’  briefly, that science as an institution has its own history that is rooted very deeply in the christian tradition and that our 21st century story of evolution is structured around the christian story of creation. This project is essentially an effort to educate myself in the content and context of the information that has formed my view of the world and the culture I’ve been exposed to, in an effort that I might be better able to critique it.

We want to extend a big thank you  to Mat Brown for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions.