Artist Matthew Robins wants you naked
Multi-disciplinary East London based artist Matthew Robins is not new to the art world, but his watercolour nudes and gouche selfie series are really something to take note of if your collection is missing a sensual or sometimes intensely sexual male nude. We sat down and spoke to him about his current works.
When did you start creating work?
It’s probably more truthful to say I never really stopped - I’m still doing the same thing I was doing when I was 5, painting pictures of dinosaurs and playing the piano and making papier-mâché monsters. I describe myself as a multi-disciplinary artist and I work across live performance, film-making, music, puppetry, writing, drawing and painting.
One of my main strands of work in the last 6 or 7 years has been about exploring my sexuality and learning how to not be secret / ashamed by it. I was brought to believe (like a lot of queer people) that we are in some way innately “bad” and growing up through the education system with section 28 still in place meant that it was very hard to find answers, or even be that certain of the questions. I had very supportive art and music teachers, they supported me unfailingly at school and afterwards. I remember my art teacher silently sliding a David Hockney book across the desk to me, open at the painting “we two boys together clinging.”
Tell us about your current series?
I started drawing people in my studio after going to a few life drawing groups and found the slightly formal structure wasn’t working for me. And there was no acknowledgement of desire anywhere. Desire and a need to communicate to other people what I feel inspires me to create - if I’m going to draw a person I need to somehow feel something for them and them feel something for me and be able to express it, talk about it, exist in a room and share the energy. The same way if I’m painting a landscape on a beach, I need to really want to be out there swimming around in that lovely water. Life drawing somehow isn’t meant to be sexy. For a while I’d been using a website that connected artists with models that had a rule saying erections were forbidden and artists were to report any models that got hard. Awful! I’m not going to report that cock to the grown-ups, I’m going to get a bigger piece of paper and draw it. I wanted to capture the transient lust of being in a room with a naked person and walk that tightrope of focus and putting that energy onto the paper. For me this meant getting to decide what I thought was sexy, choosing who I want to draw feeling free to say to people “yes this art is me telling you about what I find erotic and isn’t it fun to be naked and sexy AND look at all these lovely blobs of coloured paint I can splash around to tell you about it all.”
(Pictures above) “is one of my studio walls, a continually evolving scrapbook and things that inspire me. Photos of Edward Gorey and Louise Bourgeois alongside mid 2000s pin-ups like Michael Pitt and Justin Bieber. The big watercolour is one of my favourite beaches in Cornwall, near where I grew up, a long walk from anywhere so often very quiet and empty and somewhere to swim and sunbathe naked and paint undisturbed”.
What inspired you to start the selfie series?
I started using instagram, dating apps, tumblr (when it was good) and craigslist to find people to draw. All of this meant people started sending me photos, invited or unsolicited, and it seemed weird to have this collection of photos, I couldn’t somehow just delete them, but felt weird just having them on my computer, so after a few years of this I was beginning to realise I needed to celebrate these casual moments of intimacy, somehow preserve them - but in a public way. Someone takes a sexy selfie as a way to communicate with you that they feel good about themselves - but they’re often taken in a mirror, so they’re also communicating with themselves, admiring their own sexiness. Some people have sent me hundreds of photos over the last few years. They’re walking around with this shrine to themselves in their pocket. I hadn’t wanted to work from photos, it seemed fake, too easy, but I wanted to improve my skills with gouache paint, so I thought oh I’ll paint some of these selfie photos as an exercise. And I painted them small and on cheap cardboard and they immediately had this real power to them, a immediate energy. Little icons to private eroticism. The selfie takers were also really keen for me to share the paintings online in a way that they wouldn’t with the photos and I started putting them on instagram and they were selling fast and I realised I had found this other little world in which to connect with people and celebrate our shared sexuality. Then covid-19 arrived and we were all locked down and staring at our phones even more to find connection with others and the project really took off and I ended up getting maybe 7000/8000 submissions. Overwhelming. This had become an instagram based project and they were getting shared a lot and I was feeling part of a community and having interesting conversations. And then instagram shut my account down. I lost all the connections. I lost all of the messages. I lost the community and I lost all the amazing selfies that I hadn’t saved to my phone. They wouldn’t let me recover the account and although it’s mad to feel sad about an app, I genuinely miss that feeling of being in a community of interested and interesting people. I’ve started again with a new account, but I have to censor everything now and it has no impact, and I hate being part of something thatmeans I have to choose to self-censor if I want to be included.
What’s next?
I’m only now beginning to piece together the various parts of my life - growing up without the internet existing and in an atmosphere of fear and confusion around being gay - it’s only now I feel like I’m fully addressing this in my work, only now that my emotional maturity is catching up with my maturity as an artist do I feel I’m becoming an “emerging artist” - the work is becoming more self-consciously autobiographical.
I’m currently making a series of zines based around some of my drawings from life in the studio, and I’d like to finish the current selection of selfie paintings and have an exhibition of them. I’ve been seeing a therapist for the last few months, in part to try to sort through the feelings of shame around my sexuality. Posting on instagram had been a nice way to be a little anonymous, or at least have a bit of a character to hide behind, but being shut down prompted me to realise I have to go out into the real world at some point and take my art and say “look at these paintings of sexy boys, I know these people, these are my friends, we love being naked and queer and making art about it, and we probably all had erections the whole time too.”
I’m also working on some longer, bigger pieces, exploring my own longer-term thoughts about sexuality, the folklore and mythology of the people and things that got us to this place at this moment. The most recent piece is “Tom Daley at Jurassic Park”
What is your greatest indulgence in life?
Too much red wine.
Which artist past or present would you most like to meet?
David Hockney. It’s sounds a bit of an obvious choice, (I have heard of less famous artists) but I admire his sense of humour, his dedication to the skill of drawing, and his ability to explore different ways of making art - that all look different, but all look like a ‘Hockney’ did them. He also worked significantly to change the laws around what was considered obscene, ie the legality surrounding owing gay porn in the 60s, although that seems to have come full-circle with Instagram’s pitiful rules around nudity.
What’s your favourite gallery?
Barbra Hepworth’s house and studio in St Ives. I went to school not too far away from this and my art teacher arranged with them to let me visit early in the mornings before it was open to the public and sit alone (with the cat) in the garden and draw.
Do you have a favourite piece of work?
A statue known as the Löwenmensch (Lion-human) - it’s the oldest know animal-shaped sculpture the world, the British Museum temporarily showed it a few years ago on loan from Germany. I found it very moving. It’s 40,000 years old and incredibly beautiful. I’m very aware of the monkey part of my brain that controls a large part of my behaviour, I like to work a lot with animal imagery in my art, I’m working on some shrine / totemic pieces at the moment exploring this - so this piece connects with something inside me.