Matthew Brennan IV is the Boston based artist behind Two Thangs. While Two Thangs has been active since June of 2015, Matt has 20 years of experience as a working artist and designer. Two Thangs was relocated from Seattle, where it started, to Boston in July of 2018 and then Providence in 2020.
My art starts with a conversation. I am usually situated behind a table, facing you, making contact with my piercing eyes as I say: “Two Thangs makes original acrylic paintings where you give me two pieces of the outside world and I work with you to mash them up into original art”. “Pieces of the outside world” can mean any creative content you identify with, specifically anything you choose that’s not specific to your life. As long as it’s not YOUR uncle, YOUR parrot or YOUR driveway, I’m likely to roll with it and we’re going to make something new and cool together.
That’s exactly how everything started with most of my 200 collaborators over the last seven years as we talked at convention centers, bars, fields, old churches, boxing rings--any space where there was a gathering of folks where the seeds of the process could be planted. When people whittle their interests and identities down into a few specific things, it says quite a bit about them and I find the places where they connect fascinating. There is a financial transaction, which weeds out either a fleeting momentary idea or doesn’t. If someone is a person that really lives their life about fleeting ideas, the act of commerce will not deter it but it reinforces that it’s a choice rather than a default. Within that transaction, cost is kept as low as possible with the intent of enabling as many people as possible to participate in the process.
Collaborators may or may not reveal to me why they chose their two ideas. Even this choice says something about who this person is. I trust my collaborators and inject their intuition into the work. Some steer the ship in a very specific direction using me, the artist, as a tool to execute their idea. Others provide little feedback, preferring to see the artist’s interpretation in the final portrait. All of the choices they make are put into this “portrait” and we make images that talk about a person, a place in their lives and a moment in their time without actually simply being a physical description of them.
I then take these images with me out into the world. I return to the bars, convention centers and fields and talk to people not just about getting a painting made with their choices but also which of the paintings I’ve already done speak to them. No matter how obscure the references or how specific they are to the person that chose them, wherever I go I find that there’s a person in rural Illinois that connects deeply to the same ideas a person in Manhattan chose, bringing their vastly different life experiences into connection.
In some ways, Two Thangs is the embodiment of kitsch. Most of my collaborators have no art background and this is often their first original art purchase. This means that they may not come from the vantage point of knowing what’s already been done but it also means they come at it with fresh eyes. The content they choose are often pieces of their environment or motivations for art that the typical art world shuns, however, in the landscape of contemporary painting, content has largely been proven to be irrelevant. The “content” of a modern painting is usually a vehicle to entice an interaction through aggressively confounding the audience. It is a great technique to choose an image so obtuse that a viewer will react with inquisitivity however it’s shortcomings are that A) it’s been done extensively to the point that it is the current orthodoxy and B) that many people who have less motivation to be interested in art react negatively and simply walk away from the whole process. Art has been trying its best to avoid being reduced to “I like that painting because I like Kanye west”. My question is why not? Why avoid a positive initial response? Having your work reduced to a resonance based on nostalgia is a blow to the artistic ego but beyond that, what is its worth in the process?
Two Thangs frees me from the obligation of the “what” to paint but allows me the joy of working on the “how” it is painted. Stylistically, I work to make these paintings as intricate and interesting as I can using the process of applying pigment to surface. While some may be drawn to a painting because of who or what is painted, my goal is that the subject is just the introduction to the piece. My hope is that after the introduction, viewers become more interested in the how, and that draws them into a more thoughtful understanding of what a painting can be. Two Thangs is intentionally different from art in a gallery experience. It is art that is made for a home setting where it will be viewed over a longer duration, able to be studied and considered over time. I eschew the more traditional realist painters as influences and focus my efforts on abstract mark making within a likeness, the push and pull of vibrant color exchanges and the graphic qualities of paint.
In a way, I see my paintings as more of a craft and my entire body of work under Two Thangs as one large piece of art that talks about all of the people that have interacted with it. My art begins when we strike up the first conversation as a piece of non-performative performance art and morphs into a process documenting the people that have chosen to interact with it. As it grows and people take the idea of “two thangs” and shift it to what it means to them, so does the scope. From people, to places, to music, to songs, to philosophies, to symbols and metaphors, it’s an ever evolving cultural language of personal significance and I’m here for it.