We recently had the chance to connect with MATTHEW ROSE and have shared our conversation below.
Hi MATTHEW, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to share your story, experiences and insights with our readers. Let’s jump right in with an interesting one: What is a normal day like for you right now?
I typically start my day with a cup of cold coffee. I’ll review book sales, e mails, then move on to daily chess puzzles and the obligatory Wordle. My atelier is a five minute walk from my apartment, so when I’m coffee’d up, I’ll head there and try to clean up the blizzard of paper from projects the night before. Then I’ll start anew cutting and painting and nailing together collages and works that could be on tables or spread out across the floor, or on walls or drying. It’s a lovely mess. By picking up and putting away and moving these works whether on canvas, paper, wood or board I get to see them fresh. My mind has already moved in a half dozen different directions overnight, so by stirring the pot I can see and understand what I’m doing from different points of view. Often it seems the work takes place while I’m sleeping.
When I start with a new piece, I’ll choose something from dozens of virgin canvases I have stacked up, coat it with an acrylic paint and, drawing from a pile of clippings I’ve gathered the evening prior, begin to cast a narrative the pieces themselves suggest. Occasionally the progression begins with an environment – a mountain space or an interior or a dreamscape – other times with a troupe of surreal characters made from the soldier’s legs of old etchings, children’s book duck heads, or simply images of clouds, buckets or shoes. Lately I’ve gone into geometric abstraction with the notion of generating works that can be scaled large. I’ve recently acquired several canvas frames that are some of the largest I’ve ever worked with. Should be quite a trip.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I am an American artist living and working in Paris. I grew up on Long Island, just outside New York City, attended Brown University and graduated with a degree in Linguistics and Semiotics. My dual focus has always been on writing (fiction, journalism, publishing) and art making (collage, drawing, painting). Since I left Brown, I’ve never stopped creating a double trail. I published works on art and advertising in national and regional publications and a exhibited my art across the United States, Europe and Japan.
My family was quite typical, and perhaps I was not. Hard to say if I communicated in any appreciable way with my siblings, though my mother was quite a creative, her talent largely untapped. My father seemed to sense I was on my way somewhere else. A World War II veteran (D-Day Plus 4), he probably couldn’t have imagined his son living and making a life in France. I talked with him often and we shared a love for art – though he would have been happy if my massive installations sold out and he could stop worrying about my welfare.
Moving to Paris in 1992, my work has continued and my life has expanded. I’ve traveled widely and continued to publish. My exhibitions have become the basis for books, and there have been many. “Weekend Plans,” a series of collage works became a massive exhibition at the Karuizawa New Art Museum in Japan (2019-2021). During the pandemic I produced a wildly successful work entitled “Coronaville,” a repurposed cartoon from 1949 that re-imagined the townspeople as members of a Trump-like cult who flip out when the Corona Virus comes to town. It’s audacious, and as it turned out, quite true. More than 550 books were sold on Lulu.com … More recently I’ve produced a book of my exhibition “Natural Causes” (Galerie 727 / Montmorillon, France) and “Liancourt Confessions” (Paris). I am preparing a couple of new books now – “Signs & Wonders – A Walk Along The Camino del Norte” and “ANOTHER DAY” a 300-page book of collages and paintings, both due out in 2026.
The texts for my books are almost always fictional, surreal and function as captions to an internal struggle to understand my own personal obstacles and unpack my psychological baggage – a torturous relationship with my two adopted brothers (I am the youngest) and their early deaths from drugs and obesity. How all this plays into my life remains a mystery but it’s there, quite deep and undoubtedly affects my ability to process information and find a clarity. After all these years, I think I’ve come to terms with the notion that it’s my set of bags and I’ll just tote them around with me wherever I go. So I suppose my art in all its scratched, torn, glued and scissored reality is a reflection of that history. This is what I’m always working on.
Amazing, so let’s take a moment to go back in time. What did you believe about yourself as a child that you no longer believe?
As a child I thought I was indestructible and because I loved fire and explosives would concoct giant firecrackers and light them up. Once, perhaps I was six years old, I lit one and before I could fling it away, it blew up in my hand. Stunned, my ears rang and my fingers stung. But they were all there and I think the world changed before my eyes. I was in that moment convinced I had some kind of super power. Alas, this was not true and throughout the ensuing years I’ve been taken down by almost every sort of explosion – falling off bicycles, tumbling down staircases, knocked out by a large rock tossed over a fence onto my head, sports injuries, skiing injuries and of course, broken hearts and busted egos. I no longer believe I’m invulnerable. Nope.
What fear has held you back the most in your life?
A great and potent question that relates to other questions regarding giving up, wounds, suffering, pain and power, and how I view the arc of my life as both a creative and a growing human being. As a child I was perhaps a bit precocious and I knew this; my two older brothers saw this as a threat and would regularly beat me up because they could hardly keep up with me intellectually despite the age difference – five and two years younger I was. I was so hungry, however, for their love and approval, I was terrified of showing them up, making them seem small, and being the big brother I was perhaps meant to be. That, in the end, proved to be a tragic narrative for them. They needed guidance and it was not going to come from their younger brother. They spiraled out of control, grew addicted to booze and drugs and died fairly young (43 and 56). And yes, I feel guilty about that, but also self-aware enough to know their paths was not my path. And yet this behavior undoubtedly keep me on a narrow road, a bit fearful of taking more risks – in love, travel, in my art.
Fear of success, was and is a contributing factor to where I’m at. I’m good but could be better, I’ll tell myself all the time. I could find that groove but I’m a bit chastened in thinking well, I don’t deserve it, it might not work out, I might not earn the respect I deep down know I’m owed – meaning, the self-respect. It’s a puzzle and a lot of my art work and writing deals with this. I’m conscious enough to know what ails me.
So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. Is the public version of you the real you?
Wonderful question. The answer of objectivity and subjectivity, self-awareness and the public perception of my private reality is rife with complications. The answer is yes and no. We all perform in front of the people we know, the people we don’t know and ourselves. Self-deception is a permanent aspect of our realities, our subjective consciousness. We can’t get around it no matter how aware we are, no matter how much we mediate upon the subject of who we are and what we are.
I play music in public. I have exhibitions. I sing. I talk about my work. Even here, in this interview where I choose questions to answer, there’s a slippery aspect of who I am and what I am and the light-like projection of who I am and what I’m trying to get across, to broadcast, to reveal. Sure, there’s an agenda and yes, there’s a rabbit hole. Or rabbit holes.
Perhaps the best metaphor I have for this conundrum is that we are all basically wandering around in the pitch blackness and we’re giving the ability to light the path a bit with our minds, eyes, ears, sense of touch and others to help navigate the way forward. But even those tools become blunt and dull and dim. Artists can perhaps make the best use of these damaged wares, inventive creative types such as we are. What we carve out of this life is like the pile up of neuroses we acquire during our lifetimes – our personalities. And it’s as fluid as the darkness.
Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. What do you understand deeply that most people don’t?
I don’t think my understanding is widely held by people, but I don’t believe, in a deep sense, that there is any point to the program of humanity. It’s a happy and accidental reality that humans inhabit earth. That we sprang from a chance encounter of molecules and electricity and launched, from that unintended soup, a great and amazing society is quite astonishing. Now we are defined in many ways by the machines we’ve created, the buildings we’ve constructed and the the languages we speak and relationships we have. Humanity is however, a bit self-destructive; we’re time bombs; there’s no objective truth to our existence and in my believing that, I realize I’m not in the mainstream. Most folks believe there’s a serious purpose to human life beyond gravity and physics. Well I think that’s great for them if it helps get them through the night. I’m trying to live eyes wide open with all my wounds on the outside, and perhaps that’s the part of my work that people will see and appreciate when I’m no longer here to point it out to them.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.instagram.com/maybemistahcoughdrop/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mistahcoughdrop_official/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-rose-55819b6/?originalSubdomain=fr
- Other: My book: https://www.lulu.com/account/projects
Image Credits
All photos of art works, ©Matthew Rose. Photo of Matthew Rose playing mandolin © 2025 Daniel James De Beer.
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