Come See “RAINY REFLECTIONS”
FREE ENTRY
Galley is open 9 AM to 5 PM Monday- Friday
Local resident Matt Millican starting painting relatively recently and is quite prolific. Finding painting as an outlet to relieve stress and look at life in new ways has been a true opportunity for Matt. He is a father of three and has been married for 15 years. A native of Oregon City, Oregon, he moved to Ontario in February 2015, originally taking a job in mental health at the Snake River Correctional Institution after graduating with his Masters in Counseling Psychology from Pacific University in 2014. He now works treating domestic violence as a mental health counselor working out of Ada and Canyon Counties, Idaho. Having worked in forensics and criminal behavior since starting school in 2007, and being far from the scenery of the Pacific Northwest, he began painting as a way to counter the stressful and challenging world of helping broken families heal, and as a way to create the scenery from his native home.
He started painting in March of 2017 having watched others paint online, most notably Bob Ross – he decided to give it a try with some paints his father had left behind with his passing. The objective was simply to be able to create a world, and to escape for a time from the stress of forensic work, and re-enter the beauty of the Pacific Northwest. Some of his paintings are from imagination, others his own rendition of photographs or a combination of several photographs or even other paintings, with the objective simply to be to create and inspire others to try. He works with oil on canvas in an impressionistic style, working wet-on-wet, and enjoys creating woodland scenery, ocean scenery or rainy reflections. Having been taught how to work in stained glass and wood by his father, and having been a musician a number of years (piano, trumpet including bugling for the US Navy & Marine Corps East Asia Honor Guard), he found paint to be his favorite medium for artistic expression. He found the most remarkable thing about painting is that “As it comes together, there is not just one painting, but fifty before it is finished. It also looks different over the days and weeks as the paint cures and pigments blend. It teaches you a lot about yourself and forces you to grow, to be bold, take risks, see accidents and mistakes in a different light, and enjoy successes. Matt Says, “The strangest thing is that most of the works I am least satisfied with people seem to love the most, I’m not sure if that means I’m a good artist or a bad one.” He encourages everyone struggling with life’s challenges to find something new to try, to find and create themselves as a way to work through life’s stresses. “Thank you all who encouraged me and supported me in this creative journey, most recently the Four Rivers Cultural Center.”
