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Stan Matwychuk - balancing art and life

" The artist's office is in his head. And the artist is always in the office..." Anonymous He does it all. Paints. Draws. Designs. Manages. Performs. Consults. Volunteers. Yeah. He gives public talks - informative and heartfelt and totally positive.
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" The artist's office is in his head. And the artist is always in the office..."

Anonymous

 

He does it all. Paints. Draws. Designs. Manages. Performs. Consults. Volunteers. Yeah. He gives public talks - informative and heartfelt and totally positive. Yeah. Works with kids - hands' on and experiential and entirely dedicated to the moment. More yeahs.  Even his collaborative efforts with other artists are notorious for their high fun factor.

His range of media is also wildly imaginative. From canvas to school bus. From the side of a building to a culvert or even the deck of a skateboard. Nothing is too big or too small. He's dancing at the convergence of pop and underground. Playing out on the edge.

Get what I'm saying? Stan Matwychuk walks his talk. And he does it all for the sheer, liberating rush of creating new stuff. And yet - let me catch my breath here - the 28-year old Squamish local still holds down straight jobs slinging drinks and landscaping to make ends meet. Sound familiar?

But it's not like he's whining about it. For in Stan's world, being an artist is all about commitment. And patience. "I'm slowly getting there," he says. And then shrugs. "You know - it's a real challenge to connect your art to the business of every day life. "

Being an artist sounds like fun. You know, hanging out at the studio with your toque-clad buddies. Listening to Chet Baker and Arcade Fire. Discussing the latest gossip on Banksy and Mr. Brainwash. Coming up with new concepts to explore. Wearing paint-splotched clothes. Smelling like turpentine and B.C. cigarettes. Who wouldn't choose that lifestyle?

But reality is far different. You have to produce. Every day. Pay the bills. Promote your work. Sell it even. The total of which, says Stan, will defeat all but those who are committed 100 per cent to what they're doing.

"It's a cliché, you know, but you really have to believe in yourself," he explains. And that doesn't mean being arrogant or conceited or haughty. But it does mean working hard. "You don't stop being an artist the moment you put your brush down," he says. "It's a full-time thing. A life-decision. You have to be intrepid, ready to break trail. Otherwise you'll never get there."

For Matwychuk, his moment of truth came at a very strange juncture. "I was travelling in Cuba," he recounts. "And somehow I got lost in the back streets of Havana. I mean, picture it: I don't speak Spanish and I don't know where I am. I'm tense and nervous. In fact, I'm getting more and more uncomfortable. I really wanna get out of there."

He grabs a breath. Lets a second pass. "All of a sudden," he says, "this little kid comes skipping down the street and he gives me a big wink and a smile." He stops again. Begins to laugh. "Suddenly I realize that all this fear I have is holding me back. I realize that I have to release this fear if I want to move forward. I don't know where my next breath is going to come. But I just have to trust that it's going to happen..."

It was a powerful moment. "It's kinda like choosing the noble, humble warrior route," he says. "You know it's going to be hard.  But you know it's the only route you can take."

As usual I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to the beginning -

Like many other corridor residents, Stan Matwychuk grew up in Southern Ontario. "I had a convoluted upbringing," he tells me. His parents split up when he was a kid. Whitby is where he went to high school. Whistler is where he ended up when he graduated.

"My first visit was in the summer of '98," he says. "I'd come with a bunch of friends to attend snowboard camp. I still remember driving up the highway. I couldn't believe the beauty. What the heck was going on here? I realized all of a sudden that I'd been totally in the dark about what was happening out west..."

But that was soon to change. "I had one more year to go at school," he says. "The moment that was done, I jumped in the car and headed west."

Stan embraced his new lifestyle with both arms. Still, it wasn't all that easy. He says he had a combination of twelve jobs in seven years. Lived in fifteen houses at least. And all the while, he was doing everything he could to insert himself into the valley's art scene. But he just couldn't get traction. "I tried so hard," he says. 'But the universe wasn't paying me back."

By 2007, he'd had enough.  Didn't matter that he'd just finished co-facilitating the first legally commissioned public mural in Whistler with local legend Chili Thom. Didn't even matter that he'd finally had his first solo show at MY Place, "that no one came to see," he says laughing, "because October is slow season in Whistler with every local counting pennies." It was time for Matwychuk to leave the Whistler nest.

"I needed to re-find the reason I was doing all this art work," he explains. "I mean, you can cloud your mind with everybody else's reasons. But if you really want to move forward in an honest way, you have to find your own reasons."

Never one to take baby steps, Matwychuk went directly from mountains to beach. Well, not quite directly.

 

"I decided to head down to the Cayman Islands where I knew I could get a job bartending on the beach," he says. But before he was allowed entry to the Caribbean country, he needed to get his visa straightened out in Florida. "I was in visa hell in Miami, just trying to survive from day-to-day, an illegal alien. That's when I came across this restaurant called Sushi Wave. And I got inspired. So I pitched them on doing a mural. And they agreed!" He bursts out laughing. Takes a long, long breath. "I made enough money on that job to stay alive until my visa came through. It totally changed my trip."

It was such an important moment, says Stan, that he commemorated it by getting a custom sleeve inspired by legendary Japanese artist Hokusai's "Great Wave" tattooed on his shoulder. And that was that. Although his Cuban epiphany was still in the future, the die had been cast. Stan was on his way.

His two-year Caribbean sojourn taught him a lot. "Being a tax haven, the Cayman Islands are getting overwhelmed by western values," he explains. "But they're still very proud of their culture. Their National Gallery is all about protecting the Caymans' artistic heritage. And I spent a lot of time there studying what they were doing." A long pause. "Which really inspired me to think of what we could do back in Whistler."

Besides, the Olympics were coming to Canada and the world's biggest media spotlight would be shining down on his adopted home for the next nine months. By the summer of 2009 he figured he'd learned all he could from his tropical adventures (which included volunteering to teach art to kids in Nicaragua and distributing donated supplies to needy artists in Cuba). Whistler was calling.

"I got home a few days before Canada Day," says Stan. "I figured I'd invested so much of myself in this place that I had to come back. Besides, I was genuinely excited about the Games. I knew there'd be a lot of opportunity for artistic expression there."

The young revenant didn't waste any time. "I just started filling out forms and trying to get all the information I could on the Games schedules. Suddenly I had a gig for every day during the Olympics." He smiles. "It was insane!"

In a recent Pique article on the Games' impact, Holly Fraughton put it well: "[Stan] definitely didn't shy away from any Olympic activities: he was involved in the Fire and Ice at Skiers Plaza; live painting and facilitating Whistler's community mural project with another local artist, Vanessa Stark; and coordinating the urban mural graffiti exhibit at two on-site locations on Grouse Mountain... He also painted live at Lululemon and with Converse shoes at Showcase, and helped kids make contributions of their Olympic memories to the community's legacy book project."

That's the thing about Stan. He's not afraid to go for it. Not afraid to step up and take a chance. "Coming from a single-parent family I was pretty much self-governed," says the creative director at artist-run Homebase Studios in Squamish. "So I kind of became a jack-of-all trades. And I guess that still kind of defines me as an artist. I love new projects. I love new challenges. For me, it's like that old saying: 'with every ending there's a new beginning.' Know what I mean? " And he laughs and laughs and laughs.