where there’s smoke there’s fire

Acadia National Park Artist-in-Residence: Memories From Maine by Ben Matthews (Instagram):

Boloney: An Artist’s Favorite Sandwich

For each highlight that occurs pursuing a life as a creative, hundreds of unsuccessful moments and rejections beat your spirit into starving artist oblivion. All one can do is pick up the scattered dreams strewn about from the ass-kicking and move forward. It’s an endless cycle of very high peaks mixed with low valleys that rarely has any middle ground.

This instance is one of the successful moments. I was heading to Acadia National Park to be an artist-in-residence. I would be staying at the Schoodic Institute in an apartment generously provided by the National Park Service. I believed I had wasted my time applying, but I received an acceptance letter around a year after I forgot about the program.

My artist statement below is the one I used for the application. I also refer to this as boloney needed to make it seem like I know what I am doing. Some artists excel at creating artist statements. It’s usually a page full of random adjectives and adverbs strung together that reads like a poem written by a mythological being, Oh! And don’t forget to list the highly esteemed MFA from Nobody Cares University.

Ben Matthews is a fine artist based in Pittsburgh, PA. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1995 and has exhibited his work locally and nationally since 1998. His work was represented by OK Harris Works of Art in New York City from 2000–2013 until its closing, and is represented by Mendelson Gallery in Pittsburgh, PA. Ben’s current work depicts mysterious adaptations and inventions from this not-quite time or place based on environmental concerns and social topics. His drawings combine visual puns and irony with social messages. His exploration into a unique, fantastical, and sometimes unsettling universe encourages viewers to think about current concerns by presenting a glimpse at futuristic flora, fauna, and manmade inventions that have resulted from our impact on the world.

Would you like some mayo or mustard on that boloney sandwich?

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