About the artist

Matt Guild lives in Martinborough and is inspired by family life, rustic rural simplicity and nostalgic every day objects. He works with realistic, still-life images that capture the emotional history of New Zealand. To achieve a resonance with his audience he takes ordinary, often seemingly mundane or everyday objects and injects new emotional life into them by positioning them in the more whimsical landscape of our communal memories. In this realm there exists a constant, internal dialogue between personal experiences whilst growing up (memories of trips to the dairy and Jaffa’s melting in our pockets) and our other, unspoken, 'national childhood'. When transposed to canvas his work intimately visualises those sensory moments from our past that still bind us together as a nation today.

"My paintings are about light, shadows, reflections and about the way things look in their environment. I love capturing the detail, the way a certain object looks in a moment of time. Capturing New Zealand icons and pulling on the heart strings, helping us to remember where we have come from, this the over all passion of my work.

Realism painting for me is about capturing every day bits and pieces, the reality of living."