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“My work pulls from the rural spaces I grew up around and the contemporary life I move through now, blending nostalgia with something new. This site is a home for those stories.”
MEET RED
Red Matthews (b. 1979) is an oil painter whose work is rooted in the iconography of Americana, especially the visual language of the American West. Raised among the farms and ranches of north county St. Louis, Missouri, he formed an early connection to rural life and open landscapes that continues to shape his practice.
In 1999, he moved to Savannah to study oil painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design, focusing on the human figure and classical technique. After college, Matthews lived in New Mexico before eventually relocating to the Pacific Northwest. His time in the Southwest—reinforced by frequent returns to Santa Fe with his wife, a native of the region—left a lasting imprint on his visual vocabulary. He later continued his studies at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in the late 2000s.
Matthews spent nearly a decade in rural Idaho, surrounded by ranches and arid mountain terrain, further deepening his engagement with themes of Western life.
Drawing from these lived experiences across Idaho, New Mexico, and the Midwest, Matthews creates paintings that merge classical, contemporary, and pop sensibilities. Combining figures and landscapes, his work evokes a time when reputation, resilience, and the elemental challenges of daily life shaped human experience. Using a collage-like process that blends his own photography with archival imagery from the 1920s–1960s, he constructs layered narratives that explore memory, myth, and identity within an American context.