Michael Workman

Matthew Ivan Cherry grew up in Arizona and did his undergraduate work at Northern Arizona University. Afterward, he came to the School of the Art Institute and in 1998 graduated with a Masters of Fine Arts in drawing and painting. He has always considered himself a traditionalist, very figurative, working mostly in oil. Cherry's the first to admit that the contemporary-leaning SAIC perhaps wasn't an ideal place for him, but he went out of a desire to learn, as he puts it, "how to walk the walk of an artist." He wanted to contribute and participate in the larger art world and felt he needed to bone up on what, as he explains, "really being an artist is about--to establish connections to an art-world community." For Cherry, that meant teaching, something he's done since the summer after his MFA when he went into administration at the University of Chicago. That experience brought him, in January 2005, to his current position as a dean at South Suburban College. From there, he's able to comfortably concentrate on his art, now producing the thirty to forty paintings per year that show at Gescheidle Gallery. Typically, he paints life-size, and the two canvases scheduled for unveiling at the Howard Tullman collection show this week as part of Chicago Artists' Month are of this scale.

Cherry's personal life is lived as rigorously as his professional and artistic pursuits. He and his wife Amy have five kids. How does he do it all? "It's a juggle. That's one of the reasons I stick with administration: I needed to give my family stability. Art's the passion, and my family's very supportive of it. They all have something like it that they do. We're all very supportive of each other, but it's definitely mass chaos." His solution has been to work his family into his art. While many of his paintings are self-portraits, he often integrates narratives about family members into his work; it's a mutually beneficial relationship, explains Cherry. "They get to see what I do and be a part of it."

(2005-10-04)

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