ARTIST JODY MATTISON and one of her 16 oil paintings now on display at Gallery 621.
Keri Luiz/Staff

❒ Exhibit by artist Jody Mattison features women ‘comfortable with who they are’

By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

Artist Jody Mattison said her “main thing” is to paint women “in our skins, in a feeling of inner strength.” Sixteen of her new oil paintings, of women in different poses and environments — but all “comfortable with who they are, and projecting that to the world” — are now on display at Gallery 621.

Mattison said she doesn’t approach a painting with a any overt plan. Working with a live model in her Antioch studio, “they sort of grow, and I build around them what I feel about the model.”

She only works with people she knows. “I’ve been working with them for years, so it’s a personal relationship,” she said. “They’re people. They’re not just bodies. I don’t think of them as being an abstract idea.”

Each painting gives her a meditative feeling, she said, and a feeling of communication with the person on the canvas — “even if it becomes somebody else. They’re not carbon copies or photographs of these women, they are representations of these women, however realistic they look.

“The image itself becomes imbued with my personal feelings about it, but I’m also thinking about that model as a human being as I am working on it.”

The 16 paintings in the Gallery 621 show were recently finished, though some were started as long ago as 2005. Teaching often intrudes on her art, Mattison said.

But she found a way around that.

“Being deadline-oriented, I set up a show so I could get these finished. All of these have been worked on in the last two months — in a major way!”

Mattison has been involved in the arts all of her life. She received her master of fine arts degree in drawing and painting from San Francisco’s Academy of Art College (now Academy of Art University) in 2000; she taught periodically at the academy for 12 years. She currently teaches in Walnut Creek at the Civic Arts Center and at Lafayette Studio in Lafayette, as well as in Antioch at Antioch Atelier.

Though all of her paintings at Gallery 621 are oils, Mattison also enjoys working in charcoals, acrylic on paper and some printmaking. “I need a press!” she said.

“I’ve even done some encaustic, which I love, but it’s such a big production that I haven’t had the time,” she said. “But I do love it, it has a surface quality, and its translucence is magnificent.”

But Mattison has a natural affinity for figure drawing. “It’s what I care the most about. I was going through old drawings and found a drawing I did in figure drawing class at San Francisco State when I was there when I was 19. It had the same quality as I do now. It’s just something that is a very internal part of me,” she said.

“I do landscape, I do still life, I teach both of those, and I enjoy them. But for me the figure is the pinnacle. It is a communication. And a meditation.”

If You Go
A reception for artist Jody Mattison will be at Gallery 621, 621 First St., Saturday from 5-8 p.m. Gallery 621 is open Thursday to Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. For more information call 707-746-6211 or visit gallery621.com.

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