Underwater Figurative Realism Of Matt Story

I try to find the crystals of memory that we all have in common, like an archetypal sensation: those moments that we've never experienced before but seem suddenly familiar.

I work from hundreds of photos I've taken underwater but never from a single one. I want it all to come from the human filter of memory and try to conjure something, again collective, and not particular about the setting.

I'm driven by the abstract quality of seeing. As Lucian Freud said, the more you look at reality the more abstract it becomes.

The painting process itself takes me around 200 hours just applying oil paint. I begin with opaque layers and end with as many as 5 to 10 transparent layers of glaze to constantly adjust my hues. I follow a classical tradition because I grew up loving nothing more than old master's paintings, like Caravaggio, Titian and an army of others.