Art in Motion with Action Artist Matt Cheney

Few artists can say they created a painting while free falling from an airplane."
- Dana Ranill of Fuel.tv
Few artists can say they created a painting while free falling from an airplane. For 25-year-old action artist Matt Cheney, it’s all in a day’s work. Though it may seem unconventional, action sports are as much a form of artistic expression as they are competitive sports. And Cheney has further explored the idea of action sports as art by integrating activities like snowboarding, skateboarding and skydiving with oil painting. Here’s how…

Cheney’s action art is inspired by abstract painters like Jackson Pollock and Saburo Murakami who defined action painting during the abstract expressionist movement of the Post WWII era. Intrigued by the performative nature of action painting, Cheney uses various action sports (which he loves) to create the movement behind his work. Working with a crew of several people, Cheney uses video cameras and still photography to document the visual experience of his paintings. “The whole process for how it’s done, from the oil paints to mixing the pigments and thinking about the composition, is free spirited and spontaneous. I love the idea of preserving a moment in time.” For his senior project at the Art Institute of Boston, Cheney built a halfpipe in a studio and created paintings like Pink on Black while skating up and down the halfpipe