Matt Herriot
Yale College Class of 2022
February 14, 2021 - May 15, 2021
Matt Herriot is a portrait painter from London, UK, who is on course to graduate from Yale College in 2022 with a BA in Art and History of Art. Previously working from digital images and now exclusively from life, Herriot is focused on creating compelling visual dynamics in the medium of oil paint, through the genre of portraiture.
Matt Herriot’s second solo exhibition comprises six observational paintings of Herriot’s home environment. The series marks his departure from portraiture as the dominant genre of his oeuvre - a move inspired by the isolation of remaining at home during the pandemic, and motivated by a desire to capture the naturally occurring compositions in his immediate surroundings.
The subjects were chosen for their usefulness in creating engaging compositions of paint and colour: Number 2 exhibits a deep black form, a tea towel, amongst a sea of cream; Grounded 5 boasts an abstract motif of three blue plant pots across its centre, with a large swathe of green covering the top half of the canvas. The large-scale works seek to be appreciated not just as pictures, but as paintings - with their strengths lying in their compelling distributions of colour and dynamic brushwork.