12/6-12/7 | Cutter & Cutter Fine Art | St. Augustine, FL

Matthew J. Cutter: Endless Views

Matthew Cutter’s solo show at Cutter & Cutter Fine Art presents a new body of work from various trips the artist has taken.

A new body of work by Matthew J. Cutter, about 20 pieces in total, will be on view at family-owned gallery Cutter & Cutter Fine Art’s St. Augustine, Florida, location. Many of the oil and acrylic pieces seen in the show reflect the painter’s recent summer trip to the South Dakota Badlands and surrounding areas, including Yellowstone National Park. Cove at Yellowstone Lake, oil on canvas, 36 x 36"

“When you’re in Florida, you’re always seeing flat landscape and you can only see so far...so being out West and being at elevation, you have the opportunity to see for miles and miles...and I like the challenge of that,” says the artist.

Cutter explains that amidst the hustle and bustle of the trip with his family, there wasn’t much time to sit down and paint in plein air, so he primarily drew sketches of the landscapes that captivated him, returning to those sketches later on to paint them into fully realized scenes. Often, this approach of witnessing a scene and committing it to memory with just a few hardened details from a sketch, allows the artist more freedom when he ultimately returns to the piece. He says that he’s interested in the work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who would go out on the Thames with a sketchbook and would “distill it through his memory.” Cutter creates a lot of his paintings this way. “It’s an amalgamation of a lot of different thoughts about an area,” he says. “It can be just as rewarding to pull a pure emotional element.”Seasoned, acrylic on Crescent board, 15 x 20"

The wilderness of Yellowstone is a major muse for Cutter’s work in this show, with oils like Cove at Yellowstone Lake, Entering Yellowstone and Geyser at Norris Basin. “Geyser Basin was something so spectacular. To feel the heat and steam coming off that, it’s really quite amazing,” says Cutter, who had the opportunity to do a few plein air pieces out there. Entering Yellowstone, oil on canvas, 36 x 36"The slightly dilapidated front porch of a quaint building is seen in his acrylic Seasoned, which came from a family trip to Tennessee in which Cutter happened upon a little side building that was part of a church and knew he wanted to come back to it. “I like the whole idea of this passing of time. You can clearly see the door’s been rusted out, it hasn’t been painted in a while, it’s old and weathered, but what struck me was that in its heyday it probably held a lot of events in the community,” he says. The piece won Best of Show at the NOAPS Best of America National Juried Exhibition this past September.