Mat Tudor is a contemporary painter based in London, known for his figurative paintings which often take the format of the portrait, he is also the founder of The Tunnel, a collective of diverse artists who put on exhibitions and art events featuring a range of themes, often inspired by literature and philosophy. Mat Tudor was born in Birmingham in 1976 before studying painting at Wolverhampton University graduating with a BA Honours Degree in Painting in 2004 and continuing on his studies with a Masters in Fine Art from Middlesex University in 2011.
Tudor is an artist who defines himself strongly as a painter in a contemporary art world where multimedia experimentation is increasingly becoming the norm, he describes a formative moment when at the age of 17 he saw a documentary on Modern Art which featured the infamous work by Pablo Picasso called the Weeping Woman, a moment he describes as being a turning point in his life at the time. Like many teenagers do he felt like an outsider and that he was leading a directionless life of hedonism, heavily into the metal and techno music scenes along with all the highs and lows that come with it.
After viewing the weeping woman he instinctively felt that the artistic life was a life he desired to live and that would provide him discipline and meaning that would give him direction and it was then that he committed himself to becoming a painter.
Mat believes strongly that painting is a search for the truth, and in his current body of work he uses acrylic and pastel, the main body of work being produced with pastel on grey card
“I use Acrylic and pastel. My main body of work is in pastel on grey card because that enables me to realise my ideas more rapidly whilst the works on canvas are a much slower process. The method I use is a form of reductionism which stems from Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff.”
An admirer of the London School of post-war painters such as Francis Bacon, Auerbach and Leon Kossoff, artists known for their experimental approach to painting in the post-war period, both in subject and style, his work often has had an edgy, but almost spiritual quality to it, despite Mat himself being a self-confessed Atheist.
“Frank Auerbach is the first artist I identified with because of his obsessive working routine and also his reductionist methods of working.”
He describes his work as reductionist in the sense that he wants to strip everything unnecessary from a composition to give a direct, physical experience of a given object. His current body of work is ‘The Red Series’ of portraits and figures executed in red Pastel.
His other role in the world is as a curator, the main expression of which is The Tunnel which was founded on The 12th of October 2014 – “an attempt to create with others a movement in an age when movements are practically extinct”. They produced an ambitious manifesto with the aim of exploring arts place in the 21st century and put on numerous shows in London such as The Wasteland (Inspired by the T S Eliot poem of the same name), The Zone (a meditation on the Tarkovsky film Stalker) and Mercerism (a show revolving around themes in Phillip K Dick’s sci-fi classic Do androids dream of electric sheep).
He is currently studying for a doctorate in fine art, where he hopes to advance his ideas around emphasising the place of painting in contemporary art, as well as developing his ideas around the future of painting. He says he still feels like an outsider of sorts but his craft is a routine now, and like his painterly heroes he continues to work hard to discover what painting can communicate in the 21st century, “building a coherent language of forms”.
