We recently connected with Matthew Stuart Piper and have shared our conversation below.
Matthew Stuart, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?
Hello! I believe the meaningfulness of our lives derives from our influence on other lives. But the happiness of our lives comes from the happiness we bring to others. That is the source of my purpose: to make people happy. The truest joys in life are a result of what we give, and not receive. Given what many seem to think, this might strike some as paradoxical, but I couldn’t be more convinced of its validity.
Part of my mission in the art world is to create something new, novel, different. I fell in love with a rare form of photography – infrared photography – back in 2001 and haven’t looked back. Since then I have largely shot only in a combination of visible and infrared captures.
When I began my artistic journey in photography – I had been drawing since I was a wee tot, which helped develop my compositional skills – I exclusively used infrared film. Loving color, I quickly began hand-coloring my B&W infrared images. Before long, I was in some galleries and was honored with a brief New York Times mention (working out of California at that time).
In 2008, the best infrared film companies discontinued making their infrared products. It was just too fickle, too hard to shoot, and the demand wasn’t there. But in 2015, I bought a high-end DSLR camera, had it converted to be infrared sensitive and began the 2nd era of my art career. Here’s how it works.
After removing an internal infrared light blocker, I had a camera sensitive to all the light we can see and all the light we can’t. Then I apply various external filters on my lenses to select specific gamuts of the electromagnetic spectrum to optimize the landscape before me. The result is what I call “Dreamscapes,” images with unique infrared glow and hue combinations. The basis of my art is composition, but the simultaneous capture of visible and invisible infrared light allows me to create unique art images. I sell my limited edition artwork around the country at big art fairs.
Returning to my purpose, I have heard around the country that collectors and visitors to my art tent have never seen anything like my artwork. I try to create beautiful, tranquil and inspirational images that bring a smile and peace to my collectors. To hear that, to know people are moved by my art and that I am a leader in infrared photography, is a truly blessed feeling.
That is my purpose: to create something beautiful and one-of-a-kind that makes people happy and brings solace and peace to their homes and businesses. I feel very lucky to have such an intimate calling, and the feedback from my collectors creates a positive feedback cycle of purpose and inspiration to innovate.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
My two career loves in life are art and theorization/teaching. For me, they are both fundamentally creative acts aimed at finding beauty, emotional/aesthetic in the first case, conceptual in the second.
I started my fine art photography business back in 2003, but I kept my independent studies rolling along (my chief area of scholarship is in understanding the objective neurodynamics that create subjective consciousness – a millennia old conundrum). So, in 2012, I began my doctoral studies at UC San Diego in “philosophy and cognitive science.” I chose UC San Diego because, as it happens, it’s one of the best places in the world to study that question – with world-ranked philosophy, cognitive science and neuroscience departments.
Having put my art career on hold, I resumed it in 2017, while continuing to work on my PhD on the neurodynamics of time consciousness. I graduated from UC San Diego in 2020 but, given the momentum of my art career, put teaching positions on hold to focus on growing my business. I sell work online, but my chief income is selling my art at large art fairs around the country. It’s a fun but intense way to make a living: carting around a portable art gallery that you erect in a half-day, have fun meeting all kinds of great people, and then collapsing the booth, just a few days later, to move on to your next show.
How did it all start? My sense of composition stems back to a childhood of drawing. After I began learning photography, I fell in love with infrared photography when I discovered it back in 2001. It was love at first sight. Given my resonance with its surreal nature, I have exclusively specialized in infrared fine art photography for the last 21 years. The first phase of my career was hand-colored B&W prints; now, I sell mostly limited-edition digital color infrared on metal. I call my work, “Dreamscapes” or “Magical Realism.”
I encourage young entrepreneurs to follow their passion, share before taking, and make as many connections with good people as possible. The friendships are worth it on their own, but partnerships and sponsorships arise thereby, too. In life and business, win-win relationships should be the fundamental goal.
If you’d like to see more of my work, you can visit my website www.matthewstuartpiper.com or my Instagram @matthew_stuart_piper. I also started an IG hub for popularizing infrared photography, where I feature the best infrared artwork from around the globe @infrared_global – if you like my work, you’ll enjoy this page. I hope you connect!
And whether you invest in my artwork or not, I encourage everyone to give fine art as gifts: not only is it a lifetime present, but it’s one of the most personal and meaningful gifts you can give.
Feel free to contact me at iammatthewpiper@gmail.com with any questions, good luck with your own endeavors, spread love, and be well!
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. As a photographer, a natural sense of composition – complexity and balance harmonized – is foundational.
2. As an artist, a natural sense of confidence in one’s vision and the courage to develop a unique style is foundational.
3. As a member of society, a natural desire to bring happiness to others is foundational, and the surest way to be proud of what one has contributed and thereby be further motivated to continue developing one’s unique voice.
All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?
I can mention 2 main challenges at this stage of my art career.
(1) With the glut of social media and communication broadcasts in general, it isn’t easy to develop a large following and generate online sales. Art fairs are wonderful, but generally dry up in the winter (save for in select southern states, far from my home in the midwest). So online sales are an important additional source of income, necessary for reinvesting in my business. Yet they are not especially common. Nor is it easy to generate a large social media following. As elsewhere in life, the rich tend to get richer and the poor poorer – meaning accounts with a lot of followers tend to overshadow and obscure less known accounts. There is a special obstacle for me here, as infrared photography is a little known and even less well understood type of art.
I am lucky to be an influencer and leader in the global infrared community, and the community is growing fairly rapidly as people are exposed to the amazing, stunning imagery, but it’s still a small photographic (and artistic) niche. So I am trying to grow the community through connecting with others via social media. One effort in this regard was the creation of an infrared-only Instagram hub: infrared_global.
(2) The second main challenge is to help people understand that infrared photography isn’t just computer editing. My work requires a unique camera and external lens filters before I even take a shot. It’s more Ansel Adams on steroids than computer editing. This is a crucial detail, especially for my collectors, because they realize the process is more specialized, and more traditional, than mere computer manipulation. Once potential collectors realize that my art requires quite a bit of specialized hardware, their appreciation is always greatly enhanced.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.matthewstuartpiper.com
- Instagram: @matthew_stuart_piper
