Mercedes Matter, Visiting Artist Lecture 1966

Mercedes Matter shares slides and gives a lecture talking about her artistic practice. Matter begins her lecture by telling the students that they must learn how to draw accurately prior to assuming a naiveté in their work for which there is no excuse. Matter goes further into this, that training requires preparatory drawing for years before using color. They must learn to cultivate the mind, to then lead color into an intellectual path. Matter then talks about what has influenced her own painting practice, including a wide range of literary influences, which inspire her to think about the power that words have as an artistic form of expression alongside painting. Matter tells the students to think about what the relationship is for them between the motivation of a work of art they create and what this means. For her, portraiture is the ultimate achievement of what interests her the most, as she finds it as the most challenging undertaking. Matter tells the students to always finish their ideas and to work meticulously from observation. Matter says that she often works from life and has always done so, even when she lived mostly in a city and couldn’t afford models. By working from life, Matter was able to achieve duration and solitude in her work. Matter was also able to become aware of overtones and sensations from still life and landscape. For Matter, this reverberation of sensation has led to a correspondence with meaning which has greatly enriched the stimulation derived from still life, setting up a mode through which a series of echoing sensations can be spurred into being.