Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

My name is Matt Cobaugh. I am 26 years old and I am from Texas. I moved to Chicago in 2018. I did a year in Bloomington Indiana while my fiance, Dori, was getting her masters at IU and then we moved back after. I paint, make music, like riding my bike and walking my dog. I work in education. I drink lots of water but I eat like shit when left to my own devices. I love playing Counter Strike, Minecraft and Fortnite with my friends. I like playing with tech decks and building ramps for them in my studio. I like extreme music and normal music too.

How did your interest in art begin?

I remember visiting Corpus Christi where my parents are from when I was probably around 10 years old and seeing a distant cousin who was a little older than me. He showed me a graffiti magazine and tech decks. I was obsessed with skateboarding and graffiti from a young age. That developed into different action sports over the years but I think that experience was instrumental in my being interested in art. My grandmother on my dad’s side whom I never knew, was a painter and many of her still lifes and landscape oil paintings hung in our home as well as most of the Cobaugh’s homes. I went to random art camps as a kid and I remember doing a Pollock-inspired splatter painting and thinking how awesome it was. I shot film photography and filmed my friends scootering and skateboarding and edited those videos before ever I made anything physical. In high school, I started taking art classes and started making collages. My entire SAIC admission portfolio consisted of collage.

What influences do you think play an essential role in your work?

The world right now is a massive influence on everything I do, physical and theoretical. The intense nature of life in America from an objective standpoint has some influence. We have a ton of privileges living here but it’s fun to be critical and be pissed off by the news. I have always felt in some way driven by the disgusting nature of the US government and even from a young age felt an amount of disdain for American politicians and corporations. We’re living in a failing state and I hated being here for a long time but over time came to realize how much I love it. I haven’t been out of the country much but I’m positive other countries have their own problems too. I enjoy it because it’s an absurd place to be and make art. It’s hilarious. I have always tried to view my work as comedy. I’ve never done standup and never will but I love trying to make funny paintings. It’s hilarious how attracted I am to making paintings look like they’re rotting or resemble some decaying wall. I made a few paintings while living in Indiana of Marge and Homer Simpson. I think they’re the best paintings I will ever make. I also think the Chicago landscape influences me heavily in the grit and grime of the city. The most beautiful day in Chicago is right after it rains and the rust seeps on to the ground under a viaduct. Visually it’s captivating. I think being obsessed with violent sounds and extreme music has a role to play. Being able to translate that visually has always been a goal of mine. I don’t like admitting to it, but graffiti definitely has a role to play in influencing the colors and textures in my work. Not graffiti itself but the experiences I had while doing it and the places I went to do it. I am a big fan of Gerhard Richter and Mark Rothko. I like Richard Serra. I like James McNeil Whistler a lot and old east coast painters like George Innes and Winslow Homer. The landscape seems really beautiful out there and the more traditional oil paintings of the early 1900s east coast art are hugely inspiring in the less textural work I’ve done in the past. I think my work wears its influences loudly. With that being said the natural occurrence of colors in nature have a big influence on my work. I spent a lot of my childhood in the woods near my parents house and the colors that come from erosion have always been something that caught my eye. I try to spend time in nature as much as I can and am always taking photos of the ground or weird trees or things I notice. There is no mystery.

How has your work evolved over time?

It’s always been a similar mentality or theme of the natural interacting with the unnatural. In the literal sense, man versus nature. I think I’ve always had an interest in an industrial look in any facet of my various hobbies or interests. The content has not changed but the mode of presenting the ideas has. For a long time I did collages as well as sculpture in undergrad. Then it turned into painting. Noise has always been a constant looming cloud over my work and in the background of my life and I don’t think it’ll ever be separate from me. I occasionally like to do ink drawings and have done some logo design for friends’ music projects. It always circles back to dark colors and strange content. It’s all building towards the same themes and images I have in my head. I’ve always wanted to make a series of grey paintings. 

I am slowly accomplishing a dream of being able to achieve real world textures and colors with paint. It happens occasionally where I make something and I think to myself, that’s it, there it is, you did it.

I do different stuff every time I’m in the studio, it’s all my work though and it aids for the same goal. Working in different mediums, they eventually converge into something that’s a mash of everything. I did some paintings last year that really felt like that, a compilation of studies I had been working towards. It’s an incredible feeling to achieve something like that. It’s like climbing a mountain or fighting a demon, once it’s over it’s like, damn I can rest now.

What is your studio or workspace like at the moment? Do you have any rituals when you begin working? 

I share a space that’s close to my house in Humboldt Park with Maxson Jew. That’s my dawg. We shared a space in undergrad and there is a fun duality in our work. People in college used to say my side looked like someone was getting tortured and Max’s side was so happy and fun. A Little angel and devil space. We are rarely there at the same time but when it happens it’s a good time. I don’t know if he feels the same but I rarely have people by so he and Dori are pretty much  the only ones who see things happen as they happen.

Crash comes and chews on scrap wood.

I have most of my work there aside from some paintings at my Dori’s parents house. I built a table that I use as my work station. I never liked painting on the wall so everything’s flat on the table while I work. Max and I have a fingerboard park we made that’s in there too. It’s awesome. I have a bunch of weird shit on the walls like my old Texas license plate, a rusty hand saw, a photo of a beagle after it killed a possum, a narcotics anonymous book, some sex art, scans of amoebas and diseases in petri dishes, and some art from friends.

I work with music on. Some days I raw dog it and work in silence. Depends on if I can find my headphones or not.

Your studio is full of collages featuring medieval religious imagery, anatomy, snakes, plants, pin-ups, viscera, nuns, and schematics. How would you describe the kinds of images you’re drawn to?

I like that kind of stuff. Anything pertaining to the human body, religious entities that are not Christ (or at least contemporary depictions), schematics, and various drug or alcohol medical texts and of course different animals and nature photos. A friend gave me a framed photo of an eel before he moved, you (Paul) were there when he gave it to me, it’s one of my most prized possessions.

I used to hang my work up but recently took it all down and started turning my paintings so they faced the wall. I felt like I was referencing my old work to make new work and didn’t like that. Comparing myself to my previous self. There was something weird about that. It helped. So much of what I do is just experimenting without a plan. Some days it really is just wondering if I can mix wood stain, primer, acrylic, water, and saw dust to see what happens. The funny thing is you can and I don’t ever know what’s going to happen. It keeps the process interesting. I love to ruin a painting. I love forcing myself into a spot where I hate the work. It gives me a task to work it back to something I like. A puzzle I have only made harder for myself.

The cleanliness of medical textbooks is so interesting to me. You take something so intense and visceral such as the human body and find so many ways to describe it and put it in a book, I like that. The ways we can describe human life gets simplified into two categories, the physical and the metaphysical, the quantitative and the qualitative, the data and how we feel. It’s fascinating and having both sides of the coin on my walls probably has some influence on my work. In undergrad they have you explain yourself a lot and the explanations I always used (when I made work more similar to what I’m doing now) is the example of the rain coming down (natural), wetting the door in the alley way (unnatural or manmade), the rust being created (the reaction between the two), and the erosive product leaking onto the concrete below (further product of a natural occurrence) and being attracted to this relationship between these worlds. Mankind and the natural world. Then fully recreating this process with acrylic paint which is basically just colorful plastic. So fun.

There’s an intensity and a sense of calm in your work, do you cultivate a mood or an atmosphere in your painting consciously?

Not really, I just paint stuff I think is gonna look cool. I think it’s ok to do that. People can find their own meaning in the work but for the most part I’m really just painting.

For a long time I thought I made violent paintings. I tried making violent paintings. I wanted them to seem painful or in pain or the remnants of inflicting pain. Randomly one day, Dori was like, dude your paintings are serene and calm, also you’re not a violent person. It changed my whole idea on how I viewed my own work. Haha. 

I don’t necessarily think I am going into a painting thinking, I am gonna make something about how I feel a certain way about something, or I am going to portray a specific mood. I think my works can just exist and be as they are and people can feel however they feel about them. I know what I like and I think that is shown in the work itself. The friends I have who are big fans of it, we all like the same kind of stuff. It’s definitely a territory that is my life and comes out in the work. They make me extremely happy and make me feel really good inside. They feel important to my head, kind of like purging a disease or taking a shower. I create filth so it leaves me. I made some pretty intense collages I have never posted online while living in Indiana and always thought to myself, this is important work. I devised this whole idea around how it was important for others to see these kinds of things, violent imagery, sexual imagery, gore, intense language, but really I think I was grappling with my own thoughts and feelings around having that kind of stuff in my head. I talked to a friend at a party recently who does similar work and we both agreed that it feels like it’s a release of built up tension, kind of like a personal performance or masturbation. I think it’s the same with painting or music. This shit is therapeutic and paying for a studio is better than paying for some hack therapist who’s gonna keep me paying for the rest of my life. With this at least I’m making something. I like making work that I like looking at.

When you’re working you seem to let your materials do what they do, paint flows and you go with it and you go against it. Do you start a piece with an image, a composition or a state of mind that you want to evoke? 

I listen to drill rap in the studio a lot and maybe that does something to me. I like to dance and move about quickly when I’m there alone. I take my shirt off sometimes and wear noise cancelling headphones and am constantly moving between playing with tech decks, painting, and scrolling reels. I love overstimulation. It makes me feel crazy. In undergrad when Dori and I first started seeing each other, I would stay at her place, stop at the LaColombe under the Damen stop, kill a nitro cold brew on the train and get to my studio in a fugue state of malnutrition and caffeine-maxxing. I would get to a state of basic unreasonableness to attempt to make the craziest stuff I could. If I could stimulate myself into a caffeine driven panic mixed with the general social anxiety I felt from being around people, I was winning. Hence no more coffee and just tea. I spent an entire day making a zine that I never released of all the white Americans on the FBI most wanted list. I made another zine called Brute of all these CCTV screen caps of people who rob liquor stores wearing halloween masks. I usually would have to step out for a while and call someone to walk me back off a panic attack.

 It was so fun.

I really don’t think I am consciously starting with anything. While I’m working I am not really thinking. I work based on a formula. I know that these colors work together, or don’t, and I’m going to try it. I know that this material has a good texture and this stuff doesn’t, so I’m going to try it.

My own personal laboratory.

There’s a process to the work though that I think is interesting. Everything of the past few months has been made by mixing sawdust with house paint. One day Max told me to try calcium carbonate and I said no but maybe I’ll try what’s immediately available to me in this exact moment which is sawdust. That type of GenZ attitude comes out of me pretty strongly while painting. The immediacy of resources and low cost of the work really helps. I never prime any of my canvases and for a long time I was using those Blick super packs of 5 for $30 or whatever. Currently I’m doing the most I’ve ever done which is building frames and screwing masonite sheets to them. It’s fun. I love working with my hands and building a surface to paint on but I try to keep things as cheap as possible. It’s not that I don’t believe in working with quality paint, I have some golden I use sometimes but you can get a gallon of a random ugly blue house paint from the sale section at home depot for ten bucks, how can I pass up on that? Just add black speed ball ink and you get the color of concrete. I just try to make things as cost efficient as possible so I can continue painting for a long time. Once the money runs out or I have to focus my spending elsewhere, that’s gonna suck. I really don’t want to stop making work because I’ve run out of cheap materials.

I work primarily in a series format where I’ll make several paintings in the same vein or style. 

Everything is a study.

When I think about it like that, I can keep the experiments going. Everything is an experiment. It’s my way of keeping myself actively working towards something. There will always be more work for me to make, new avenues to explore, new places to go and see. I really want to revisit making these little houses I was doing a few years ago. There’s more to do with that idea and it was short lived for a reason.

As you’re creating, how important is it to respond to material idiosyncrasies and how do you know when to intervene or when to step back and let things flow? 

I had to google idiosyncrasies before answering this. There’s a point in the process where I can’t do too much, try too hard, force something unnatural. It’s out of character for me to react in that way. I feel too much.

I let paint do what paint does. Everything is watered down into a milk like consistency and a lower. I love making washes. It’s the antithesis of my work. Washed. Washed out. Washed out feelings. Washed out memories. Thoughts you cannot really capture and are grasping to hold onto as they slip away. Nightmares I wish I remembered. Achievements that went to someone else. Failures I won’t let myself let go of. I intervene when it feels right. I don’t when it doesn’t. I love watching it dry. It’s layers of a dream that’s unachievable. I’m never satisfied with the product but that is not a bad thing for me. I once had a friend tell me, when you stop having questions about your own work is when you should get an MFA. 

I hope I never have to get an MFA. 

You’re an abstract painter, your works feature forms but not images per se, how do you describe what you do with paint, or do you?

There is a lot you can say with just color and form. I think my paintings resemble a snapshot of what I see regularly. They’re simulations in a sense. Representations. Achievements of a demonstration of the rotting dumpster. Examples of how intense those little scenes are. There’s other artists whose work I enjoy who take that physical object and hang it on a wall, literally. I like to try and recreate it with paint. It’s a fun challenge. If it’s not the physical representation, it’s the bleakness of the objects themselves, reference to the less texture-based work. Those I have less of an enjoyment in attempting to describe. The pools or fields are essentially colors I think work well together, you could say I’m more focused on aesthetics than I am concepts, but it really depends on what series I’m working on, or how much I want to think about the work. I spent a lot of time thinking about my work in undergrad, talking about it, critiquing it and I don’t necessarily think it’s a good or bad thing that I do none of that now. It just is. Abstraction is so interesting. I thought of this scale, meter, whatever you want to call it back in undergrad. It’s a rough idea about where I maybe can place myself within this, or at least consider this when I’m working, preparing to work, or post work.We have real life on the left and Malevich (total abstraction) on the far right. He might not be considered a total abstraction to some, or far right, but it works for my example. I like to slide around the scale between Malevich and Cubism, not quite representational but not quite total abstraction, somewhere in between. It’s helpful for me. It’s also fun to make stuff like this. I feel like friends overconceptualize my work and it has the capacity to do so. That’s alright but for me overconceptualizing is just giving us a reason to continue to beat a dead horse. Abstraction is just shapes and colors that may or may not represent something. Kind of a smooth brain take on it but it’s how I feel. I wonder how people who have been doing this for their entire lives feel about it or feel regarding representation in their work who primarily work in abstraction. Anything to the right of real life is an abstraction. It’s all perverse.

What’s been inspiring you lately?

I’m still inspired by the same things that used to inspire me, peeled posters on a wall, rust, waste, decaying walls in the city, it’s all still so cool looking to me. I like rocks a lot. Natural occurrences like broken trees or different colored dirt. 

I don’t go to many galleries unless it’s for a friend. It’s not something I’m super interested in which I know is shooting myself in the foot. You wouldn’t go to a restaurant you don’t like would you?

Noelle Africh is a total beast. Their work is incredible and they told me recently that the space I’m in now used to be their space, wild energy and coincidence.

 I like Andrew Hinton’s works too. He’s a new friend and has put me onto a lot of cool stuff recently. He’s another guy who never shows work. There’s some valor in painting in a bubble or a cave.

Dave Lloyd is one of the best artists in Chicago. I saw this show he did under a bridge with my friend Bill at like 7:30 in the morning and it was truly impactful. 

Max Volkman is the homie who makes some cool violent stuff, transgressive gold. We’ve talked about imagery and music. People make interesting stuff and the times I’ve spent with Max have been really helpful for my practice. Anytime anyone has ever come to the studio, it’s always a whole afternoon. It gives us time to get to know each other and talk about other stuff outside the work. The conversations that are not about the work tend to influence it. Everything is an influence.

My buddy Oliver makes great paintings right now. He owns a DIY space and anytime I’ve been able to see his work in person it’s with pounding techno in the background or shrieking noise playing. It’s also always dark and a smoke machine is going. Perfect place to look at an abstract painting.

I like talking to people who don’t paint about painting. My mom is cool, she’s the best objective opinion I can get. She came to my studio recently and it was such an odd experience. I couldn’t tell if she liked it or not but she left with some paintings I gave her. I’m really glad she picked the ones she did.

The world is inspiring, the people around me inspire me, animals and nature inspire me. I am constantly absorbing, observing, and noticing. I love riding my bike because in a car you move too quickly to see things. I’m too impatient to walk even though it helps my back not hurt.

How do you think about closure in your work, and do you embrace or resist it?

The way I am understanding closure is my ability to not only finish a work but be able to let it free (into someone else’s possession). By that determination, I am horrible at it. I completely resist it. These are my spawns, my children, my lens into myself. It’s so incredibly hard for me to sell work. I hate getting rid of it, I hoard it. 

Recently Max told me “a painting is like a puzzle, once you finish it, do you keep it forever? No, you get rid of it or put it away. You also have completed the puzzle so the idea isn’t as puzzling anymore. Let others enjoy the puzzle”. I am trying to adapt to that mentality. Buy my paintings.

Closure’s a funny thing because do we ever really forget? We can move past but those memories are still with us. We are always experiencing whether we realize it or not. A concert is the same as walking the dog. A meal is the same as taking a power nap. A panic attack is the same as a moment of joy. Closure to me is the end of worry towards something. I’m generally always worried about something or mistrusting my own thoughts and ideas. I’m constantly talking to friends about what’s going on in my life or theirs. This is a long game. It ends when I die and even then the work lives on within memory. I recently did a project for my masters program where I interviewed my Aunt and my Dad about their mother who was also a painter. She died when I was one. The project was a grueling experience and it was very emotional to hear both of them talk about her and the work she made. She made beautiful paintings of south Texas and different barns and beaches in the area. Her work is not finished. She might have some closure but who am I to assume she does. The work lives on in our homes and I still think about it constantly. We paint way differently, but her work lives on. I have questions no one has answers to. If she were here today who’s to say she’d even be able to answer them.

What do you want someone to walk away with after experiencing your work?

I would hope to think they are curious, even describing every step of the process to someone, they still have questions. Like I said before, outside of instagram, you (Paul), Max, and Dori are the only ones who see them regularly in person. I’d like to change that, I’d like to have more people come by, it’s not that I am unwilling, I’m just not social in the art scene. I talk to my friend Jake (Fagundo) in LA about painting sometimes but outside of that I’m in the hole, in the cave. I hope people think about them for a little bit or don’t think about them at all. I can’t control what people think about my work and I’m ok with that. 

Really unassuming people like the work though, an Indiana buddy of mine who’s a lot older than me asked to buy one to give to his wife as a Christmas present. Hilarious, why would you want that.

What do you collect?

I used to collect hats. I collect tech decks and books. I recently got a book on Islamic art. I collect noise tapes. Some of the best transgressive art is made by noise artists. Some of the best transgressive artists are never shown in art galleries. I am currently trying to rid my life of some collections. I unfortunately am a part of a generation that is so material focused it’s hard to break out of that. I love stuff. I’m constantly stuck deleting and redownloading the ebay app. Deciding whether it’s in my best interest to go thrifting. Dori collects cool rocks. I found a couple bones in Minneapolis recently. Then someone hit me up about identifying the skull of an animal. I don’t know how to do that. 

Why would anyone think I’m the guy who would know how to do that?

Interview by Paul Fitzpatrick