Artist Biography

Mattie O. readily admits that for an artist, she has an unusual background.  She was a civil engineer on off-shore oil rigs, bar owner in Vail, ski bum, hermit in a one-room log cabin, an environmental attorney, a single mom and cleaned guns for the Israeli army.  Quoting Helen Keller, she explains, “Life is an adventure, or nothing.”  Mattie approaches her artwork with the passion and intensity of an adventure.  She creates exquisitely detailed, dramatic scratchboard; vibrant watercolors and moody multimedia.  She paints what she loves – machinery, bike portraits, family and friends, the great outdoors, flowers and, of course, food.  Today, as an emerging artist, she is winning awards in local art shows and painting for wine labels and biking events.

Artist Statement

Incensed that the first grade teacher criticized Mattie for crayoning a green bunny, Mattie’s mother got herself hired as the grammar school art teacher.  Mattie’s mother illustrated fantastic stories on the spot to the class, taught French and sewing and encouraged all manner of colorful animals from her students.  The students loved their eccentric art teacher and Mattie was delighted and proud of her artistic mother, and wanted to be just like her when she grew up – until, her mother succumbed to illness.  Mattie immediately refused crayons and paints and ultimately turned to physics and calculus and law.  Except for small fissures, she managed to avoid almost anything creative until she was 45, when the artist thoroughly broke through.  She has retired from being an attorney, and paints full time in her studio at Tri-Lakes Center for the Arts, in the small town of Palmer Lake, Colorado.

For Mattie, creating art is an affirmation of our multiple dimensions as human beings.  Most viewers can find something that pleases them in her art because there is some aspect with which they connect.  Mattie was a woman making firsts in a man’s world and so, she celebrates the masculine and feminine in each of us. In her art, men fly through the stars on pink bikes, women have beauty and muscles, and one cannot discern if the fisherperson napping by the lake is a man or woman.  She was an engineer and an artist.  Her exquisite floral paintings merge the geometric with the organic.  Mattie’s past was intensely rationale.  She often creates landscapes with such intense, overpowering reality as to morph into the surreal.

Mattie’s favored art media also reflect the exercise of both sides of her brain.  Best for exhibiting the logical side, she uses scratchboard in novel approaches.  Scratchboard is a firm clayboard coated with black ink.  The black ink is scratched away, revealing the white beneath.  The art piece may be left black and white or vibrantly colored with acrylic inks.  Mattie achieves unique textures by using an electric dremel with a variety of attachments, as well as various solvents.  To her knowledge, no other artist creates with scratchboard in such ways.  Every mark on scratchboard must be deliberate and the creation can be painstaking and take time.  Her scratchboard pieces are dramatic and detailed. 

Mattie also loves watercolor paints because they have a life of their own and are unpredictable.  To work with watercolor is a dance between the paint and the artist, each sharing some proportion of the creation.  Mattie enjoys the spontaneity of watercolor, its translucence and light mood it creates.  She often will combine gouache and gold leaf to add interest and anchor the painting.  Unlike most artists, Mattie likes to use clayboard for her watercolors, which allows a variety of textures and richness of color not achievable on paper.

Another unique format that Mattie uses to stimulate intuitive painting is altering National Geographic magazine pages with organic solvent. This is possible because of the clay-based coating used to enhance the vibrant photographs for which the magazine is famous. She then uses acrylic paints to pull out images that she sees or incorporates the altered magazine textures as an underpainting.  The results can be intriguing as in "Mice in My Apple," or richly variegated, as in "Poppy Dreams." Viewers often connect with the dream-like qualities in these paintings.