Matthew Lisk

Lives and works in Detroit, Michigan

Matthew is an architectural designer, college educator, and painter. His painting work intensively focuses on figure and portraiture as an anthology of his reverance for the human condition, and as a contrast from his work in architecture. Matthew’s viewpoint is also informed by his identity as a gay man, openly for the last 19 years, that largely depict men and the gay gaze that’s seldom represented in realist figurative painting.

About the Show

Since the 1970's, my family vacationed in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. The highlight of every summer through my adolescence was spending the week in one of eight 1950's cabins on Crescent Lake with my family. Around the age of seven, my grandmother handed me her point and shoot camera and the results of the roll of film were a multitude of cropped figures of our fellow vacationers at King's Pine Lodges. My affinity for figures was obviously born this summer as the contemporary works I paint today maintain a similar warm palette and the candid quality of the series of photos I had taken with my grandmothers point and shoot.

- Matthew Lisk