GOING SOLO: In 1993, I was working at IBM and met a girl who
shared a house with some artists. One day, they brought out some
supplies, and I started painting and couldn't stop. I started
strategizing ways to paint full time. I set up a Web site, www.sesow.com.
I saved up a lot of money. I got rid of my car. I bought my apartment
with IBM stock. The day I got laid off from a dot-com, in 2001, I
stopped by CD Warehouse and said, "I want to hang my paintings here."
I've been living off my art ever since. All I have to come up with
every month is a condo fee, health insurance and some brown rice.
STYLIN': I started out looking at pictures and trying to paint
them. They always turned out really bizarre-looking: The eyes, the
mouth, the teeth were way too big. People liked it. Eventually I
started painting things that happened to me: When I was 8 years old, I
was playing in a field by an airstrip and was struck by a landing
airplane. The propeller severed my arm. So I've painted people missing
limbs, people pointing at someone with a disability.
Thanks, dot-com bust! Layoffs allowed Matt Sesow to chase his true passion.
(J Carrier For The Washington Post)
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ART SCHOOL: People put me in this folk-art/outsider-art group
because of the disability and the rawness of my paintings, and because
I'm self-taught. But I think "outsider" is a term that's almost like
victim art. I want to reset the expectations in the art world, so I
actively promote myself. I'm my own boss. I'm my own agent. I'm my
sales team.
NETWORKED: When I set up online in 1995, I'd search out sites
that showed art and e-mail them saying, "I'd love a link from you." I
did that probably 800 times. If you do a search on "Sesow" on Google,
I'm up to 2,500 hits. I get around 500 individuals visiting the site a
day. I don't think a gallery is going to get that.
ON THE ROAD: I'm always working. When curators ask me to be in a
show, I go. I had a five-day solo show in January in New York, and I'll
have a solo show in D.C. at the end of April in Dupont Circle [at
Art+Works+Wonders, 2122 P St. NW, Suite 303]. My paintings are pretty
inexpensive, so anybody can afford a small one, and I'll do a sliding
scale. I like the idea of somebody paying $4,000 for a large painting
and then a college kid buying a little thing for 10 or 20 bucks. Better
my stuff than a poster.
As told to Nicole M. Miller
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