By K.K. ROW, THE OREGONIAN, August 15, 2000

Dennison on Dennison

Odd proportions, bold colors and persistence have made Matthew Dennison a best-selling painter

There's something to be said for persistence-and a sure-fire formula.

Take the success of Portland painter Matthew Dennison.

After only one year at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Dennison dropped out and began hitting the artistic pavement, working a day job and shown wherever and whenever he could.

Now, almost 20 years later, all his hard work has paid off.

Dennison, 38, has had nine solo shows in the last seven years, with his most-recent show at the blue-chip Froelick Adelhart Gallery nearly selling out. Expectations are so high for his latest show at Froelick that his dealer, Charles Froelick, has gone to the rare expense and trouble of producing a color catalog.

But persistence isn't the only key to Dennison's success.

Blending stout figures and cheery swatches of color to render "faux-naive" cartoon-style narratives, Dennison has mastered a formula that has made him one of Portland's hottest-selling painters of recent years. (At the Cascade AID project Art auction this year, a small Dennison painting was auctioned for charity and fetched more than 2 1/2 times its asking price.)

In short, Dennison has discovered the buying public's weakness: its inner child.

Last week, The Oregonian spoke to Dennison to get some insight into his paintings.

Q: What does the unusual title mean?
A: It's an imaginary name. I'm always writing things down, making notes. I build words. I put words together and play around with them. Since I was a child, I've manufactured imaginary names and attached them onto things. I've done it my whole life. I only began attaching them onto paintings in the 90's. The titles aren't tied to what's going on. It's more related to an individual or the situation. They either refer to a place or a thing. "Corsair Lolly" is actually a person-a person from my imagination. In the paintings, it's the person on the left.

Q: What are the two "people" doing?
A: On the simplest level, this is about an association between people. I've taken away any potential metaphor just to make it more intangible. They're pondering, wondering about their situation. I like to reflect my whole though process in my work. Theses people are meditating - kind of like an ethereal meditation.

Q: Why the odd proportions?
A: There's a foreshortening in my figurative work. I've always drawn the figure that way. I want to change the way things are seen. I'm not interested in he way things are in the terms of pure representation. I guess it would be hard for me to draw a purely academic figure because it's so presented to us. But its something I used to do. I could show you work from 20 years ago that was really elongated and stringy- the characters had real long limbs. There was never anything straightforward or academic about my approach to the figure. It's been this juxtapositioning all through the years, a ball I've been rolling with for a while.

Q: How do you get your textured surfaces?
A: I'm real interested in the surface and how it interacts with things, with the space and the sky, the smock on "Corsair Lolly." I like to get different surfaces out of things. I rub, I used my hands, I use sticks, matches. This particular piece is canvas stretch on wood. I put the paint on and rub it with my hands. Initially, I apply it with brushes and cardboard and then I rub it super hard, to the point where, in certain areas, you get a polish to it.

Q: So, is it a landscape?
A: The forms come out of the paint, the figures out of the landscape. Often, I'll build the pieces out of the background. And in other situations, like this, "Corsair" form, the landscape will come around it. It's actually a landscape. I'm taking people and having them interact in the landscape. I'm intensely interested in what the composition of the person is doing s much as the formal reality.

Q: Why do you use such bright colors, even on the frames?
A: I respond to color; I respond to changes in color. Part of that is from living where we live. We have strong color variations here. The frame is the end of the piece. I've come to make my own frames out of attrition. It's not because I don't want to hand them over - I just can't let the piece go until the frame is done. The frame is really a window into this space. But it provide the finish oft he work to me. I really consider it part of the painting in some way.

Q: You equate painting with writing. What do you mean?
A: I want people to walk away with an association of people, color and space. I want them to look at things differently; I want them to walk away with an association of a moment. these are moment paintings. To me, it's not different from writing. Painting is a form of writing, and I want people to see the interaction of the individuals, the texture of the color, the separation of form and space. I want them to bring themselves to the painting.

Q: How often do you respond to the criticism that your work is naive?
A: That interpretation is because of the foreshortening of my figures. I think that we are so used to straightforward, academic representation that when you separate yourself from it there's an assumtion....I think we lose a lot of our innocence as children. We fall into these restrictions. I'm after a different way of looking at things.

Q: Why did you leave school so early?
A: I had been painting since 1974, and I went into this situation a total supporter of school. But I had already been painting, and school is a situation where people want to find out what they want to do.

Q: Are you influenced by cartoons?
A: I don't look at them. Again, it's an association of what I'm doing with the figures, and they're often stout, so people interpret that as a simplification or that I have an uncertain knowledge of the figure. I mastered the figure a long time ago, and I'm not going to waste my time on it.