Issue 11
Matt Leines
By Alex LukasPhotos By Adam Wallacavage
Artwork By Matt Leines
Illustration By Matt Leines
Tiger-mask statuettes, Mexican Lucha Libre dolls, Green Lantern Corps action figures, pint glasses and old remote controls overflow from the shelves of Matt Leines’ New Jersey apartment. As a student at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Leines sold his drawings on eBay for a couple of bucks. The profits would go to offset these collections on his shelves. His Internet customers doubtlessly got a good deal: Today, Leines’ drawings are bought off of gallery walls quicker than you can click “Buy It Now.”
Instead of relocating to Brooklyn with most of his classmates after graduating from RISD, the already successful Leines moved back to New Jersey to live at home. Some viewed Leines’ decision with curiosity: A rising artist who foregoes the big city to live in the suburbs. It was written in Vice magazine that Leines “lives somewhere in that part of northern New Jersey that remains verdant and secluded, and was unreachable for comment. Apparently he still lives at home, but his parents’ number is unlisted.” About moving back in with his mom after art school, Leines says, “It is just who I am. It never seemed like a strange decision… I needed time to think. I spent four years with 24-7 art on [my] mind. How much art can you take?”
Leines was born in 1980 in Paterson, New Jersey and grew up in nearby Totowa. He was brought up on He-Man and pro wrestling. “I spent a lot of my time sitting inside, drawing and watching cartoons and playing with toys while other kids were running around,” he says. “I guess I have been a wrestling fan since I was in third grade till maybe last year.” What happened last year? “It’s just hard to be a fan of pro wrestling right now. You have to really search out good wrestling in America.”
In high school, Leines formed a backyard wrestling league with his friends called the Gotch Wrestling Coalition, named after the legendary World Heavyweight Champion Frank Gotch, who held the wrestling title from 1908 through 1915. With monikers like The Great Gozleone and The Phys Ed Kid, Leines and his friends spent the weekends making videotapes of themselves wrestling on the trampoline, complete with live commentary, cheerleaders, long-running storylines, feuds and secret identities. When the announcer asked Leines: “Phys Ed Kid, why the mask?” The reply was, “I wear the mask to conceal my identity. You see, I’m kind of cutting gym class right now, and if I’m caught, I’ll be forced to run laps.”
In 1998, Leines went to RISD with the intention of majoring in Industrial Design (ID). But, he says, “Two days into [the freshman foundation class] 3-D… I was like, ‘Wow, if this is ID, I quit.’” The following winter session, during a six-week mini-semester designed to help freshmen decide their major, he took an illustration class taught by Jordin Isip, an artist, curator and illustrator. “I was terrible,” Leines says. Despite this, the class convinced him to major in illustration.
Right out of school, Leines began showing his work in galleries—and he never became an illustrator. “I never decided not to,” he says. “People just started asking for things to hang on the walls… Things just worked out in a different way.”
From early on, Leines’ art featured characters from his youth: wrestlers, tigers and your general superhero types. Initially, he says, his work was influenced by trained illustrators who worked in print and exhibited in galleries—artists like Isip and Joseph Hart, Leines’ classmate from his winter session class.
Leines’ time at RISD coincided with the tail end of the existence of the now-legendary Providence, Rhode Island art space Fort Thunder and the height of the post-Fort boom of underground art/live/play/show spaces. The Fort published the free comics newspaper Paper Rodeo and plastered the city with silk-screened show posters—their aesthetic was impossible to avoid. “You couldn’t go two blocks back then without seeing something from the Fort,” Leines says. “But I didn’t even know who was who because nobody signed anything.”
These days Leines pours through books and watches the History Channel for inspiration. “If I stumble upon something, I’ll just try to draw it in my sketchbook as quick as possible,” he says. Leines has filled volumes of sketchbooks with ideas. “I like to look at a lot of paintings from different cultures where you have to infer what is going on. If there is something I come across, an image, a composition, an idea, I just draw it—and I’ll use the word bastardized—until the initial influence has disappeared and it exists only in my world.”
Leines’ art is often exhibited alongside the work of skateboarders, surfers and graffiti writers. He recently showed at L.A.’s Roberts & Tilton Gallery with the surf artist Thomas Campbell and has been included in Aaron Rose’s Iconoclast collective alongside skateboarderturned- artist Ed Templeton and graffiti artist Barry “Twist” McGee. While all these artists share a similar adolescence, spent reading D.I.Y. ‘zines and hanging out in friends’ basements, Leines makes no pretense: “I was always too scared to do graffiti, and skateboarding —I tried for a minute.”
Leines is just as honest about his childhood influences. Unlike many of his artistic peers who use ‘80s imagery in an ironic way, seemingly poking fun at the decade, Leines acknowledges the organic mark of that era in his work and sees no reason to fight against it. “It is ingrained in me so it comes out this way,” he says. “I don’t want the influence to be obvious. I’m not going to draw Voltron, for example, but maybe something Voltron-esque.”
As for the significance of his obsessively intricate depiction of hair? He says: “It’s fucking hair.”