Mattthew Skenandore
Birth Name: Matthew Snow Skenandore Born: August 5, 1959. Provo, Utah Nationality: Native American Field: Painting, Drawing, Photography, Sculpture, Design, Writing, Film.
Training: Peter Kirk's Art's Guild, Bellevue Art Museum School, Seattle Central Community College (specializing in Commercial Art), Western Washington University, University of Washington, Bellevue Community College, Bellevue College.
Movement: Surrealism, Dada, Contemporary.
Notable Works: 3 Days (1983), Romeo and Juliet (1983), Big Idea Locomotive (1983), Armageddon (1985), Narcissistic Exhibition (1985), The Dayroom (1986), Headspin (1987), Prayer (1988), Soluble Ocular (1989), Safe Hunger (1990), Blue Skies (1990), The Expulsion (1990), The Fall, Childbirth (1990), The Tree Of Life (1992), Hitler Youth (1999), The Future of Reproduction with Homage to Bessie Pease Gutman (2002), Lilith (2009).
Matthew Skenandore is an innovative surrealist artist from the United States. His work encompasses a wide spectrum of mediums including paintings, sculpture and multimedia. Known for his pervasive use of religious symbolism, Skenandore draws from his unusual childhood for creative motivation, and often gleans inspiration from his vivid dream-life. A great deal of Skenandore's subject matter is prompted from visions he experiences in the first stage of NREM sleep, when dramatic, surreal images are conjured by the unconscious mind.
Skenandore attributes the breadth and versatility of his work to reflect the following ideas: 1. Integration 2. Particularization 3. Comprehension 4. Individuation 5. Sublimation 6. Saturation 7. Consciousness "When a statement of purpose is requested, I spin into retrospection, and as every step forward requires lifting one foot, relinquishing stability for motion, I find that any statement of truth becomes trite the instant it is uttered. However, it is safe to say that: 1. I believe 2. I doubt my beliefs 3. I believe my doubts 4. I believe again"
Major influences: Aside from the Jungian themes his paintings often portray, Skenandore cites such illustrious artists as Salvador Dali, Maxfield Parrish, Matthias Grunewald Hieronymus Bosch, Filippo Lippi and Lucas Cranach (the elder), for his painting inspiration, and Henry Moore, Jean Dubuffet, and Antonio Guadi for his sculpture.
Actively exploring art since he was a child, Skenandore attended the Bellevue Art Museum School, Seattle Central Community College - specializing in Commercial Art, Bellevue College, Western Washington University, and the University of Washington. Moving into a studio in the Seattle suburb of Kirkland in 1982, Skenandore worked with some of the Seattle area's most influential artists and entertainers, designing interiors for nightclubs, and sets for plays, circuses and enormous outdoor installations.
In 1991 Skenandore was awarded a certificate of achievement by Johns Hopkins University for co-creating and developing a device he named "Guns For The Blind", a hand-held, tactile display device that used infrared light to transmit an image to the hand of a visually impaired person.
Underskies In 2008, Skenandore drew a series of sequential illustrations with brown ink on newsprint to create a "silent novel" that he titled Under Skies. The focus was a fantasy character getting acquainted with a recently decimated landscape, persevering until he discovers a small bit of living flora that leads to an entire forest that was saved the wrath of the catastrophe and it's after effects. In the process of publishing it in a graphic novel format, it will be available for purchase in the spring of 2011. In 1991, Skenandore was commissioned to create a series of sequential paintings depicting scenes form John Milton's classic novel Paradise Lost. The series will be available in book form in the Spring of 2012.