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(and Artist’s Statement)
Matt Thomases began his passion for sculpting in his late 20’s after he had completed his education in history, economics and finance and commenced a career in investment banking. He began sculpting in clay and plaster at home. In the mid-70’s, he worked as an apprentice at night to Michael Shacham, an accomplished Israeli sculptor who had a studio in the Soho district of New York. While he has taken many courses in sculpting and drawing, Thomases is essentially a self-taught artist who discovered that he has a gift for expressing emotions and gestures through shapes.
There may be a relationship between the focus and intensity needed to be an investment banker and the concentration and determination required to create works of art in which the shapes have meaning.
Thomases started casting his abstract busts and more realistic busts in bronze in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s: The Silent Scream, Persian Queen, Faces, Ahab and others. He commenced figurative sculpting in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. During this same period he created three busts of Van Gogh from his self-portraits. Subsequently, he did a bust of Francis Bacon as well as several figures inspired by the English artist’s sensual paintings. Thomases’ unusual landscape reliefs, initially inspired by the cubist works of Braque and Picasso, were created and cast from 1990 through 1998. A new one is underway.
Thomases began to enter local shows and art festivals in Brooklyn in the early 1990’s. His first solo show was held at the Joy Horwich Gallery in Chicago in 1996. He was selected for the juried competition “Sculpture in the Park” in Loveland, Colorado in 1997. Photographs of his works have been featured in several sculpture magazines. He received two awards from Manhattan Arts International in 1998 and 2003. Thomases is an associate member of The National Sculpture Society and was accepted into the society's juried competition “Portraits: Public and Private,” in Spring 2003 for his sculpture, Van Gogh III.
Throughout the past decade, Thomases’ main focus has been on dance. He has explored many styles to communicate figures in motion. For The Matisse Dancers he chose modern dancers to be his models. His first monumental work is a 7' dancer, Tamar, completed in 2002. He studied welding at The Sculpture Center in New York in 1999 and 2000 and set up his own welding shop the following year. He has welded three versions of Dance Motion II, two 10' and one 13'. In 2004 he completed a 14' Dance Motion III that has four rhythmic motions. These steel works are all “drawings in space” that capture the gesture and blur of dancing.
In the mid-90’s, Thomases started exploring an imaginary world of abstract organic shapes, that is, shapes that one might almost find in nature. Among the many charms of his “new species” is that they float on the surface; they have no roots. In 2004-2005 he created another abstract organic group of three-sided “ferns,” each about 33" high. One of these has been recently cast in clear acrylic.
In 2002 and 2003, Thomases decided to more actively promote his works through gallery shows and competitions, including some in gardens and parks. His sculptures have been on display in New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, Colorado, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Vermont, Connecticut and Massachusetts (see resume). His works are held in private collections in New York, California, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Florida.
For the past ten years, Thomases’ art studio and business office have been adjoining in a large storefront near his home in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. He balances his life of business consulting and sculpting and still tries to have time for family, friends other interests including religion and politics. Matt is married to Jean Thomases, who is an education and community organization consultant. They have two sons who also live in New York City.
I am a three-dimensional artist. Shapes have always had meaning to me. The meanings cannot always be expressed in words. As a child, cloud shapes in the sky were like mythic sculptures. Air and flotation are part of my sculptures to this day. Nearly all my works, including the busts and landscape reliefs, involve rhythm and motion.
Several admirers of my work have described them as “lyrical.” They want to touch them and feel the shapes. I often listen to music when I am working in the studio: classical music, opera or jazz. There is a tactile sensuality in sculpting in clay and plaster. The music can influence the shapes.
I enjoy juxtaposing convexities and concavities in the same work or in paired pieces. My dancers not only have dominant shapes and clear rhythms, but they often form visually captivating negative spaces.
Dance is one of the main sources of stimuli for my art. As a child I studied music and was often taken to ballet. Now I am more inspired by modern dance. Dancer I, II, III are more classical. The Three Matisse Dancers are more modern. I believe that Matisse and Picasso played an important role in communicating and translating African dance into motions and rhythms that the Western mind could understand. In the last few years, I have created dance motions by bending and welding steel rods. I also found dance rhythms in Chinese Calligraphy. These minimalist works capture the dominant gesture of dance by drawing lines in space. The challenge for me in each of these groups is to communicate a dynamic visual art form (dance) using a static medium.
Why all the diversity? The joy of creating what my minds-eye sees is what pushes me to draw. I am accustomed to working on more than one piece at a time. The diversity enables me to actively sculpt one piece while struggling to solve problems on another. In short, the diversity helps my creativity. I enjoy the process, even if sometimes the frustrations and the uncertainties feel overwhelming. I suspect that most artists feel the same.
I am fortunate that my drawing pads are full of projects for the future. Sculptures take a long time to execute. Patience is part of the art form. Rushing is usually counter-productive. So I sculpt on, following my muse.
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