About The Artist / Biography

To understand Matthew Smith and his artwork, you must first step into a past filled with a storm of experiences. For it is somewhere within these events - a feeding frenzy of false albacore off Cape Cod, an octopus's surprising escape in deep water off the coast of Tasmania, a statue of two wrestlers forever locked in combat - and the constant barrage of ideas and images that his muse resides.

He views most things in life—artwork, log-homebuilding, commercial fishing, collegiate wrestling—as a challenge to mentally engage in and physically address head on. Perhaps this comes from a tough childhood in Brooklyn. Born in 1954 as the youngest of three brothers and the son of a straight-arrow cop in New York City, Matthew grew up confronting daily harshness. In high school wrestling, he found an outlet that would help him pursue a clearer path than many who would come of age during the full roar of the Vietnam War era.

It was also in wrestling where he cultivated a creative approach to overcoming life's challenges. He knew he rarely had any physical advantages over his opponents. He just had to out-think them. Figure out in a sense where their center of gravity was, and how to use this understanding to win. That cerebral approach, coupled with split-second, instinctual decision-making and the ability to react fluidly to circumstances, stood him in good stead throughout his wrestling career.

He adapted that mentality to commercial fishing, which he pursued after earning an associate's degree in fisheries management at the University of Rhode Island. Seizing an opportunity that few young seamen encounter, he took command of the first of two 80-foot commercial trawlers, The Sundance, out of Newport, Rhode Island. He was only 22 years old, and he used his innate intuition and unyielding drive to out-wit the migrating pattern of fish and other fishermen. He quickly established a reputation for consistently filling his boat at a time when the great Georges Banks was opening up before him.

He succeeded by not following other boats. He charted his own course, thinking like the fish he pursued, anticipating their movements based on the ocean's topography, temperature, migration patterns and myriad other variables. He excelled at harvesting the ocean's bounty, applying his drive to everything from developing new net technology to managing the widely varied personalities of a hardened commercial fishing boat crew.

But his ambition to be the best commercial fishing boat captain in the Northeast took a detour on an eye-opening trip crewing with commercial fishing operations around the world. The epiphany struck him while standing amid acres of once beautiful salmon now frozen and stacked up like cord wood in a massive warehouse in Japan. In time, he realized mankind had gone way beyond subsistence fishing to the point of robbing the earth of one of its precious resources. As both a captain and a human being, he saw that commercial fishing had become too destructive, and ironically, so efficient as to push the very livelihoods of fishermen to the brink of extinction.

He knew the time for a change was on the horizon. So what else would someone who has made a life confronting challenges with his bare hands do but build a log cabin a mile into the dark New Hampshire woods … by himself.

Typical of Matthew's personality, he didn't hire a crew, or rent tons of big machinery. In 1984, he bought a bucolic lot near Quincy Pond in Nottingham and began to dig into the hard granite that dominates New Hampshire's landscape. The pick axe, the chisel, the sledge hammer and the axe were his tools of choice. When it came to hoisting massive logs weighing thousands of pounds, he relied on his seaman's ship skills, vectoring the loads with block and tackles. Before the road to the house was completed, he towed his cast-iron tub across the pond with less than an inch of freeboard to spare.

With blood, sweat and shear willpower, he finished the cabin. By 1987, he left his second trawler, the Charlotte G, his lifeblood for so many years, to explore the instinctive penchant for drawing he'd inherited from his mother, an accomplished painter. Matthew began to take formal classes on printmaking, first at the University of New Hampshire, then at Newport Museum School. Those few courses are the extent of his formal training. The rest he learned his way: consciously hunting for a new haul of fish and sea creatures-only this time in copper as a respectful tribute to the great animals he once killed.

Much like wrestling, fishing and building a log cabin by hand alone, printmaking to him was a challenge in which great effort is the most crucial part of the process to yielding the beautiful works that hover between high craft, fine art, and inventive struggling.

Today, he continues to live with his dog Leo in the cabin he built in the woods on the edge of Quincy Pond, now his wellspring. Not surprisingly, his multi-level home is also his studio, where he commits the most powerful ideas that come to him in a flurry to paper or copper. He has produced thousands of hand-crafted prints while continuing to invent new techniques to more accurately capture the brilliance of the images he envisions.

From his wrestling with the craft and hunting for the next greatest idea comes the spellbinding color and compelling depth of the copper block prints of aquatic life, birds and other images of Nature on display in his Exeter gallery, the Copper Canoe, and other fine art galleries throughout New England.