Matthew
Cornell
by Ciara Mulvaney
On a sunny afternoon, I had the pleasure of meeting a brilliant artist
by the name of Matthew Cornell. Well known for his hyper-realistic
landscape paintings, Cornell uses his art as a medium for self-exploration. Seeking to connect his origin story to a place, Cornell has explored the idea of home through his show, Pilgrimage. His current
works were “born out of the idea of home”. Cornell was born into
a military family so he was raised as a nomad who grew up on the
road. Throughout his childhood, he was uprooted many times, and
to this day he still questions his sense of place. Having no real “sense
of home”, his oil paintings of suburban scenes and landscapes lead
him closer to his answer. Pilgrimage was recently displayed at the
Arcadia Contemporary in New York City last spring. The show was
accumulation of many years of hard work and wrestling with the
idea of home and hometown. Cornell explained his show by simply
stating, “how can I find home... maybe I can find it right back where
I started”.
As someone who was born and raised in Orlando, I have had the
pleasure of calling this city home for many years. When I sat with
Cornell, it was hard for me to imagine not calling one place home.
I then came to the conclusion that him and I could not be more different. I grew up in the same area for 18 years and will always call
O-Town my hometown. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to travel
a lot as a kid but it was only ever for a couple of weeks at a time, so I
never really got to live and engage in a new community. Even when
I went to university in North Germany, I still felt like I wasn’t a part
of that community. My school was a English speaking institution
that was situated in the heart of a suburban area, and due to the
language barrier, it was very rare for students to interaction with the
surrounding neighborhood. So although I can say I lived in a foreign
country for three years, I did not engage with local community.
Drawing on my own personal encounters, I then questioned how
much Cornell participated in his new surroundings when he moved
from place to place. He revealed that his older sister was in 12
schools in 12 years. Assuming that if you were uprooted as much as
Cornell was, would you bother to understand and partake in your
new environs? Although this particularly subject was not brought
up in the interview, I think I can say that Cornell took in his new
Low Country, oil on panel
Orlando’s Art Scene, v. 1.2
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