Aaron Aryadharma Matheson lives and works in Newtown and Marrickville, Sydney. He has been a finalist in the Mosman, Waverley and Waterhouse prizes, and awarded the Richard Ford travel award. He completed a year’s postgraduate diploma in drawing at the Prince’s Drawing School in London in 2007, and a Masters in Fine Art in 2017-18 at the National Art School, Sydney.
‘I don’t know why I paint, but I must- it helps me make sense of things, and I’ve always been drawn to paintings.
They are receptacles of thought and feeling, and fictions that say a lot about the world. Living with multiple sclerosis means that my body is compromised- so I’m very aware of the power and potency of the image and the mind reflected in marks and paint. I am interested in the alchemical nature of paint- it’s trickery, it’s fascination, it’s magic: it can conjure many things.
Paint holds thoughts and opposing notions very well, so there are no other languages that say what I need to say so well: it can speak of paint and figure, value and transience, love and relinquishment. There is an openness to painting, a kind of hovering where the field is alive with presence, ambiguity and slippage: That’s what I look for, to create objects of meditation and beauty that ‘move in a mind’’.
‘You could inhabit language in very different ways . And that language could live in your body in a way in which it could open up different worlds for you’- David Whyte.
Aaron is represented by Liverpool St Gallery, Sydney.