Matthew Rucker

Artist’s Statement

I have always painted as a way to learn more about myself. Particularly, those things which I involuntarily hide from my conscious self.

The result has been a kind of subtle surrealism that captures what is most familiar to me: duality, contradiction and ambivalence.

My paintings, like my life, reflect the Yin and Yang, equal portions of black and white, each containing a part of its opposite within.

My entire life has been orchestrated by a swinging pendulum and its polar opposites, two sides struggling together, at the same moment. It is this moment of yes and no, pleasure and pain, man and woman, that I know best, and that I paint most.
-Matthew Rucker