Matthew Fry is a fine artist and alumni of CSU Channel Islands. His work has been shown in California cities such as Visalia, Three Rivers, Camarillo, Ventura, and throughout the United States in the AP Studio Art National Exhibit in 2014-15. His art has brought life to Visalia’s annual Taste The Arts Festival for the past three years and in 2017, he was awarded the title: Breakout Artist of the year. Recently, Matthew has been creating a series of layered sculpture paintings depicting spirit animals and woody scenes. His conceptual focus of the series is how nature seeks to thrive and find success and power in every moment. It focuses on a hope and overcoming drive that all living entities possess in order to stay alive. The layered sculptures are comprised of either wood or plexiglass, oil based pigments, and are framed in solid oak.

My art uses bold images to illustrate stories drawn from nature. The conceptual focus of the my artwork is how nature seeks to thrive and find success and power in every moment. It focuses on a hope and an overcoming drive, which all living entities possess in order to stay alive. I work primarily with oil paint on canvas, but also create three dimensional wooden sculptures, which are composed of plywood sheets, hand cut, stained, and assembled into backlit scenes. My focus is on symbolic spirit animals and landscapes, created in pop-surrealistic or illustrative styles.

The natural world supplies a framework of animals, scenes, and colors to observe. Those visuals are my references which, oftentime bring to light an emotional response or narrative due to the way that each animal moves or exists within a space. I tend to focus on forest animals, putting them in environments that evoke power such as mountain ranges or within a ray of light. I wish to glorify each spirit animal in its journey of success and survival, illustrating them overcoming and rising above the trials set before them.