Our Outlier Matthew Meinhardt is working on an a unique project, three years in the making, titled "Castles and Seascapes"
For the project he "will be traveling to the Basque region of Spain to create a series of landscape and seascape paintings in the old masters style that will be distributed to supporters and exhibited in a hardcover book. All of the work created during this project is available for purchase through Kickstarter donations—the trip is for my artistic growth, and the artwork is for my supporters, a modern modern way of selling and marketing art that utilizes the tools of a more Internet-connected and socially savvy world. For the past year, I’ve poured my life into research and development for this, taking classes in master painting, honing my skills as a plein-air artist, and reading on the new wave of landscape painting sweeping the art world today. What makes this more interesting is the subconscious subversion of the project. I grew up in Ocean City, MD a small beach town, surrounded by the sometimes interesting but often generic beach-house art of seascapes and sunsets, which I never found interesting or very good. Now, living in the age of internet-fueled irony, I find myself listening to as much Jimmy Buffett as 90’s death metal and 21 savage, and oddly intrigued by those seascape paintings I saw as a kid. I wondered if my attempt to learn a nostalgic art form for its aesthetic cheesiness has now become a performance piece that is taking over my life." - Meinhardt
Full details can be found of the Kickstarter page, with a video and examples of the artwork that will be produced.