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Artist Bio :
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Matthew Higginbotham was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1963. At the age of 11, his mother enrolled him in a weekend pottery class at Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum of Art Institute. The class opened up something deeper in him that led to a career in the arts, first on the kick wheel and eventually on canvas.
From 1991 to1995, Higginbotham owned Northwest Pottery and Fine Arts based in Spokane, Washington, where he sold both functional pottery and fine art ceramics. Galleries such as Sasak in the Seattle Design Center, Seattle’s Southwest Collections, and others throughout the state marketed and sold his work. Then, in 1995, a creative transformation led Higginbotham to painting. He discovered a new way to communicate his creative vision in the immediacy of painting on canvas. This change was profound. In a matter of days, he decided to sell almost all of his pottery equipment and devote himself entirely to painting. His decision turned out to be life changing.
“I remember diving into all the art books on painting I could get and going back to the studio to practice and practice,” he says. “Then it took off for me. I painted a series of Southwest churches and that led to a solo show in 1995 at Metro Mall Gallery in Spokane, Washington, and later at Bedford Gallery in Colorado Springs, Colorado. But it wasn’t until I moved to northern New Mexico that I began to mature as a painter.”
Higginbotham moved to Chimayo, New Mexico, at the end of 1995 and continued his series of churches, one of which was his first large commission of the famous Santuario de Chimayo. At the same time, he also ran Casa Escondida Bed & Breakfast for an absentee owner, sold his paintings and postcards to guests, and was represented in a local gallery. In time, he began to focus on landscapes as his subject of choice.
Matthew lives in Santa Fe, NM and is represented by Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Bennett Street Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Authentique Gallery, St. George, UT; and Firedworks Gallery, Alamosa ,CO.
“In the early years of painting, I experimented with many subjects and eventually landscapes became my primary focus. It just seemed natural for me to want to study the nuances of what I was seeing in the fields and skies, and the more I painted them, the more I began to understand how they made my feel. When I found colors that worked the best for me and could paint better, a whole new world opened up. I could really get into a landscape and start seeing the many wonderful opposites — darkness and light, peace and chaos, subtlety and directness, intensity and muteness. At that level, I could begin to really start expressing my emotions on canvas.” - Matthew Higginbotham |
