Matt Koester is a man of many talents. As a multimedia artist, his mediums span poetry, prose, music, video, digital art, and video games. He prints tee shirts with art he makes in Microsoft Paint, is working on his own Zine, and played an opening set for Chicago rapper Milo. He is currently living in Galesburg, Illinois, working as a journalist at the Galesburg Register-Mail. Matt’s work accepts and embraces imperfections. It’s engaging, jarring, and intriguing in its content, mediums, and frantic pace. I caught up with Matt about his early memories creating art and what his artwork means to him.
Don: You seem to produce new art constantly. What is your earliest memory of creating art? Have you always worked at such a fast pace?
Matt: My first memory of creating art is probably using the Magna-Doodle, which was an old toy drawing tool that let you draw with magnets on an erasable surface. It was kind of like if an Etch-a-Sketch had a touch screen, but was also a completely analog piece of equipment. When you finished a drawing, you could slide a bar from left to right to erase your drawing. I always liked the stuff I made on the Magnadoodle more than the stuff I drew on paper. Maybe it was the fleeting nature.
Another memory is trying to put together a personal collage of things I loved (such as Thomas the Tank Engine, my cats, and Michael Jordan) for a preschool project. I got frustrated and ripped some of the pieces up, and in the center I scribbled a massive dark mess of circles in multiple colors. My grandma always encouraged me artistically, too. We’d make ornaments around Christmastime and other projects throughout the year. I was always into arts, but not into crafts. I liked going off rails, working off mistakes, revising and over-revising. I liked filling my entire canvas, and then the back of my page. I used to sell marker and crayon art in my basement that I hung on the wall for $1 each. I remember making a very colorful illustration of The Beatles’ “I Am The Walrus”. I have always worked fast. I sketched in the margins of all of my notebooks, church bulletins and kids menus. I think it was just a way for me to focus. I was always spacey as a kid. I can be very impatient and averse to planning things out, in part because I don’t expect things to happen according to plan.
Art has remained something to do in the background; I always have a tab of MS Paint open, and I’ll flip between that and whatever I’m doing throughout the day. I’m a big procrastinator, but I try to procrastinate in a way that produces something of value.
Don: Microsoft Paint is often (perhaps wrongfully) thought of as cheap entertainment for bored middle school students. Why did you start to use Microsoft Paint as an art form? What do you like about the medium (as opposed to photoshop, etc).?
Matt: Microsoft Paint is a mediocre art program if you’re serious about art or graphic design, although it has changed a lot over the years, and there’s been a bit of a resurgence with it among vaporwave people and pixel artists. I first made digital designs using the Game Maker (now Game Maker Studio) image editor to make animated sprites for video game projects in Elementary School. I didn’t get into Paint until around the end of Elementary School when I started getting into making sprite comics, which are comics made out of video game assets. I learned the basics of the program that way.
I didn’t really come back to the program until college, when I didn’t have Photoshop on my laptop. I’d taken high school Photoshop classes, and Photoshop was comfortable for me at the time, but it has a lot of downsides. It’s incredibly opaque, bloated with features and tools most users never touch, devours RAM and hard drive space, can be very slow, and Adobe’s whole system for licensing software has only gotten worse and worse over the years. I could not for the life of me figure out how to transfer my Creative Suite license from my family’s PC to my laptop, so I decided I’d just start making stuff in Microsoft Paint, first as art for a musical duo I’d started with a friend, and then just for general artistic purposes. I started off creating geometric figures out of shapes and sampled images. As I got better with the tool and my own sense of aesthetics, I ended up applying for a college radio position doing graphic design, and they took me on, so I figured I must’ve been doing something right. I think Paint has been right for what I want in a medium, which is simplicity. There’s no layer system, so all the decisions you make feel final, but also mean you can easily mess things up in ways that you don’t foresee.
A lot of my work is about creating messes, creating clutter, creating strange patterns and seeing what I can do with them. I mix that with illustration. I try to use the program’s faults to its advantage, such as using the color artifacts left by rasterized text or paint brushes as parts of texture. There’s such a physical aspect to the program that you don’t see elsewhere, and I think it gives the work a tactile quality. I don’t think Paint is a superior program, but I think it’s valid as any other, and that art is codified in a lot of ideas of what is superior to what. An artist is not only as good as their tools- they’re as good as their work.
Don: How would you describe your artwork? Are there consistent themes you try to convey?
Matt: All art is political, so I wouldn’t shy away from saying my art has an intention behind it, even if that intention is not explicit in its creation. I follow an improvisational creation method, trying out whatever ideas come to me while knowing that I can always press undo if something goes wrong. I am against empty professionalism, glossiness, corporateness, oppressive minimalism, sterility, fascism, bigotry, white and male supremacy, and any ideology of art that presupposes “effort” and “realism” as important. I was born with a physical disability, and to say that hasn’t impacted me as an artist would be naive. I have a drive to create, and I will do that regardless of the ableist metrics that decide what divides acceptable and trash art. I will engage in and encourage ambiguity as well as bluntness. I will destroy a piece if it will make the piece better. It would be ignorant to say I don’t take influence from others or try to make art with certain styles and intentions, but most of my best work is, to some degree, unintentional. It’s hard to tell when a piece will turn out great or bad, when it will elicit a huge response or nothing. I guess my response to that uncertainty was to plow in, try to create as much as I can, and acknowledge that whatever missteps or failures or non-starters will eventually lead to Better Things. Sometimes the amount of lateral movement I make between mediums has slowed that growth down, but I think it’s also lead to work with a stronger conceptual than technical basis, which is the kind of work I’m generally more interested in in the first place. I hope others can feel the same. My art is the space between chaos and order, material and immaterial, thought and instinct, idea and execution, creator and viewer etc.
Don: Where can I buy one of your infamous tee shirts?
Matt: I haven’t been creating much clothing lately because I need to get more supplies for it, and I’m not a college student anymore so most of my customers don’t live within a 5-minute walk of me. That said, you can check out my shirts on TeeSpring or feel free to reach out to me directly if you have an inquiry. At the moment, I make all my tees by iron press onto thrift store clothing, which means I don’t always have the right combination of color and size. I really like making more complex, ephemeral stuff, even using scraps from other pieces to make new ones. I love fashion and clothing design–I hope to do more of both in the future.
You must be logged in to post a comment.