Talking Blue

On view now at the AGO, Matthew Wong; Blue View is introducing visitors to the late Chinese-Canadian painter’s unique exploration of the many moods of blue. Comprising more than 40 artworks from Wong’s Blue Series – ranging from intimate gouache on paper compositions to large scale oil paintings – the exhibition marks the first major museum show of Wong’s work to date.   

On Tuesday, October 5 at 7 pm, artists Soumya Netrabile and Peter Shear join AGO Deputy Director & Chief Curator Julian Cox for a conversation about the extraordinary life and practice of Matthew Wong. Ahead of their talk, we connected with Shear and Netrabile – both friends of Wong – to find out how they first encountered the artist and why his work is so special to them.

Peter Shear

AGOinsider: How did you meet Matthew?

Shear: Matthew sent me a message through Facebook in May of 2013, having seen a painting of mine on a blog post shared by a mutual friend named Paul Behnke. In that first message he referenced the painter Kimber Smith who is fairly obscure. I thought ‘this is my guy’. Our correspondence continued on Facebook and later Instagram until his death.

AGOinsider: What about his artwork interested you? What did he like about yours?

Shear: Matthew was recovering an aspect of Chinese painting that the moderns had used to build their painting engines but that’s not what most interested me. Rather, it was the manner in which he went about absorbing and digesting everything, and the bravery and humility present as he discovered and expanded upon the work. He wasn’t afraid to make the bad paintings in service of the great paintings. It’s a fine line. His trajectory from start to finish has been emphasized over and over but to witness close-up the development of something so impactful and fully his own was a privilege, and we knew it at the time. He was always the first person I wanted to see a new painting. A great climbing partner. I think he liked that my work is largely concerned with the fundamentals.  

AGOinsider: You curated an exhibition featuring Matthew at The Provincial in the summer of 2016. What did Matthew’s works bring to that exhibition?

Shear: A month prior we had made a two-person show at a pop-up space named The Occasional in Burlington, Washington, hosted by another artist we both knew from Facebook named Brian Cypher. It was a transitional moment for Matthew, I think. This was the first time I was seeing his work in-person after several years of looking online, and the landscape had become even more prominent. I can’t remember if these were oil or acrylic but they were smaller relative to the work he would make soon after, like 22” on the long side maybe. Nothing sold and in fact I don’t think anyone came. Maybe a couple of people came by accident. We exchanged work at this time. The painting he gave me for the group show (something like 10 artists) at The Provincial was sort of a mountain landscape, a beautiful grisaille and the consensus piece at the opening reception. Someone said it was scary, and it was.   

AGOinsider: The descriptor ‘self-taught’ is applied to both you and Matthew, despite your mutual deep engagement with art history and form. If there are similarities between your work, how would you describe them?   

Shear: Matthew said in 2014 that he was self-taught as a painter but that the term was problematic. “I feel too aware to be an ‘outsider’ artist.” Maybe less self-taught and more self-selecting-- we were both able to find a lot of what we needed online and that was new. I think we saw in each other’s work an urgency and a poetics. Both of us used cheap brushes.

Soumya Netrabile

AGOinsider: How did you meet Matthew? 

Netrabile: Somewhere around 2016, shortly after I started an Instagram account, I saw a couple of Matthew’s pieces (they were watercolours or gouaches). I hadn't really looked at his IG page or even followed him, but I remember being struck by the simple elegance of the compositions in these works. One image stuck with me. It was a figure under a brick archway, with some blooming vines crawling up the wall on the right side. The colours were simple and muted, which I believe lent to the power of the overall image. In 2018 I was visiting NYC and happened to be walking back to my hotel down 2nd Avenue, where Karma is located. I saw that there was an opening going on and walked in without knowing it was Matthew’s first show. Most of the people there were socializing rather than looking, as I made my way around the gallery. Matthew was talking to someone around his age, when he saw me looking at the work and we made eye contact. At that moment I just knew he was the artist, even though I‘d never seen his face. On my way out I had to pass by him, so I stopped to shake his hand (which he hesitated to accept) and say how wonderful the show was. It was a very brief exchange and I left. After I returned home to Chicago I posted on my IG tidbits of shows I had seen in NY, his being one of them, and he sent me a message thanking me and then started following my IG and I reciprocated. That’s how we first connected. 

AGOinsider: What about his art work interested you? What did he like about yours?

Netrabile: Matthew’s work always existed on a different plane for me in the sea of artwork on social media. I admired how efficiently, yet poetically, he was able to create his work. I could feel what he was feeling, and I think that is what always strikes me most about it. He put himself into the work with such raw honesty. I could not help but feel his energy, his emotions in everything he made. I actually cannot say if Matthew generally liked what I was making. He clicked "like” on most all my IG posts, but I take this very lightly, as I think people do this on autopilot. He only commented three times on certain works, where he genuinely seemed to be excited about it. I included a photo of one of the pieces in my group of images I sent to Julian [Cox]. Regarding this particular image, we had a brief text exchange. He told me he loved the energy and sensibility in it. He even said he’d like to trade me for it, and I thought he was just being kind, so I never followed through. 

After Matthew started following me, I noticed he was looking at my stories. This is where I’d share a poem or piece of a poem that I had read in the morning (I do this daily). This is what he first started messaging me about—asking who wrote it, or why I liked it or something he liked about it—so it became clear to me he loved poetry too. After a few weeks of this, he suddenly started messaging me poems that he had come across. The first one was a poem by Garrett Hongo. I don’t remember the exact poem, but I remember we spoke about it over a long exchange. He loved the details in Hongo’s poetry, how he transports the reader immediately into the space by describing objects to which we can easily attach ourselves. This is an 'aha! moment' we both came upon while talking about Hongo. We both got excited about this idea of how to help move the observer (reader, viewer) into our space. 

AGOinsider: I understand that poetry was a shared passion between you and Matthew. Did you find similar things in it? Did you have shared tastes?

Netrabile: We had some overlap in taste, but Matthew was looking mostly at contemporary poets while I was tied to older ones. He had minimally read Emerson, Whitman, Wallace Stevens, so I’d send him a lot of their work. We both loved Ocean Vuong’s first book. Matthew was enthralled with Ocean. We both read On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous together, chapter by chapter, and come back to discuss it. I’m not certain about this, but I feel like I turned him on to Rilke. I don’t think he’d given him much consideration, but Nikil Inaya might know better. Nikil accompanied Matthew to poetry readings in Hong Kong, so I imagine they might have discussed poets. Rilke is one of my favourite poets. I suggested he read Letters to a Young Poet, which he took to immediately.

AGOinsider: You work in vivid colours yourself and describe him as a confident stager of colour situations. What do you mean by that?

Netrabile: The phrase “colour situations” is Matthew’s, not mine. On one of our rare conversations about painting, we were speaking about how different painters feel colour. He replied that he admired how certain painters, like Vlaminck or Kirchner, were able to effortlessly figure out colour situations. I think what he meant is how well these artists set up colours adjacent to each other, which both of us felt triggered the viewer to take the first step into the image. I look at much of Matthew’s work, and I can see that he was keen on this idea. He was already working this way before we even had our discussion about it.

Don't miss On Matthew Wong: Soumya Netrabile and Peter Shear, October 5 at 7 pm via Zoom. This is a free event, register here.