Hope For The Picture Guild: Del Rey Loven on Matt Dibble

Professor Del Rey Loven talks about his selections for my up coming show at www.artscollinwood.org opening September 17th 2010

The year is 2010. This is the year Dennis Hopper died. Dennis Hopper was a damn good abstract painter and post-modernist artist. He came out of the abstract expressionist, pop-art era, but was known as an actor. He called himself a painter, who acted for a living.

Matt Dibble is an artist, both post-modern and abstract, who does roofing for a living. Thankfully Matt is not known for his roofing, he’s known for his painting, and he’s a damn good artist.

Jackson Pollock said: “A painting has a life, let the painting live.” In those monumental pictures that Pollock made, he created a space, and noted art critic Robert Hughes said these paintings were akin to the monumental landscapes of the American West. Hughes said, “It’s like a space you can move into.”

Matt Dibble gets his work to come to life in the painting process. He creates space in the paintings that’s all it’s own.

Willem De Kooning said that when he was standing upright and secure on two feet, he didn’t feel like he was getting it right, but when he started to slip, for just a moment before he fell, he’d have a glimpse at the reality he wanted to paint. He called himself a slipping glimpser.

Sometimes, in Matt’s studio (the aesthetic roof he has created) when you look at the paintings, such a dynamic space is created, you can just see the artist slipping on that steep pitch, tumbling into the magnificent, violent, exulted and indescribable space.

It’s been said the aesthetic experience is an ineffable one. You can’t fully put it into words what you experience when you see a Matt Dibble painting. There is so much going on.

He is a man who knows his medium. Every bit as a roofer knows how to put one shingle down on another, Dibble puts color upon color, shape upon shape in workmanlike manner that is both first rate craftsmanship and high-risk aesthetic adventurism. I selected these paintings because they represent Matt at the top of his game.

Del Rey Loven-recorded August 10th 2010

Del Rey Loven's paintings have been exhibited in numerous American venues, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Minnesota Museum of Art, and the Louis Meisel Gallery, New York City. His work as an educator has been driven by the question, "What will be the role of the creative person in twenty-first century society?", and guided by the conviction that "when there is a creative gift, there will be a place of service." This has led him to research and develop academic programs in Art, Visual Communications, and Architecture. The Bauhaus model of integrating academic studies in Art, Architecture, Craft, Design and Industry has been a longtime inspiration.