Paintings — Matt Breen — Writer and Artist in London

In recent months I’ve been working on a series of intimate, small-scale abstract paintings. Quite often, they come in pairs, as diptychs. For the most part, I see these paintings as rooted in the landscape tradition.

I take a lot of cues from the everyday bits and pieces of the environment around me. Things like tarmac, kerbs, hedgerows, lampposts, footpaths and fences.

Older, figurative paintings are often drawn from AI-generated images. I’ve put these to one side as I found they got too weighty in content and narrative. Using this strange, eerily effective new technology was fun, but it gave me very little room to adapt.

For me, painting is always a trade-off between planning and improvisation. I constantly sketch, and I make preparatory drawings. After that, all bets are off. Very quickly, the painting takes over: it tells me what is required next. Some work is relatively quick, but I’ll often paint in many layers.

I paint in oils, and a kind of tempera: egg yolk and gum arabic mixed into tubed watercolour and gouache. The tempera binder ruggedises the paint mix, allowing me to scratch back, overlay, correct and adjust without (in most cases) totally destroying what I’m working on.

For me, painting in the twenty-first century has to contend with the fact it exists in a world filled with high-speed, stimulatory, low-trust images. It’s a profoundly fallible, human-made form of communication with about 60,000 years of baggage. What is it supposed to do? How is it supposed to do?

You can see more of my work on Instagram.

- October 2026