A Heart in Mt. Washington: Raphael Matias’ Inner World

The road that winds to Raphael Matias’ house is the kind of road you don’t know about if you’ve never stayed around LA very long.  It’s also the kind of road you love if you’ve lived here.  The streets and houses are formed between the dry grassy earth of the wild lands in and around Mount Washington.  In Autumn, the sun is shining and yet the homes are shadowed in their hiding spots.  “No sound,” Raphael tells us.  “There is never noise.”  We all laugh at the occasional clinking of beer bottles that the neighbor takes out to the garbage, “They’ve been saving up for a week,” he tells us.  Yes, this is LA, and this is where Raphael Matias lives.

“You can touch them,” he says, allowing me to run my fingers along the textures of his canvas.  My eyes take in the stunning quality of the thousands of tiny beads that compose the visual feast.  You don’t just want to look at his work, you want to touch it.  And, he is the kind of artist that says that is okay.  “What do you use as adhesive,” I ask.  “Tacky glue.”

“I love the view out my window,” he confides.  “I love that you can go hiking just up the trail.  There’s no one around.”  I wonder how many people living in this city can say that.  Yet it dawns on me that privacy and solitude are precisely what this mosaic artist has sought.  He creates, thematically, from the “inner world” of the artist.  He spends hours each day situating beads onto a 4 x 4 or 6 x 6 wood canvas.  Tweezers in hand, bead by bead, Raphael assembles his stories of love, forgiveness, and moving on, much like a quilter tells stories, stitch by stitch.  When he works in Byzantine glass, he does the cutting himself, which can take several weeks.  He is a process artist; his art is born from the content of his life and develops from the ongoing, continual integration of his emotional reality.  There is a heart in each work, literally and figuratively.

His friends call him a “mosaic painter.”  It may take him six months to a year to complete one piece, but he does so in his semi-secluded abode, filled with art he has collected from his life abroad in South Africa, his travels, and friends living throughout the world.

His awakening to art came after the Chicago-born tennis champ moved to LA and met a painter.  Fascinated by her mixing of colors, he asked her one day if he could play around.  From thence he began.  But, it wasn’t until he met a woman in South Africa and fell in love that he truly began his work.  Heartbroken from having to leave his love for six months, he withdrew into his first canvas, entitled “Siempre Estaremos” (We Will Always Be Together).  Inspired by the beads worn as garnishment by several of the eighteen different South African tribes he came to know, he began with beads.  He returned to South Africa to live half a decade, where he now has a daughter.

“I make art for my children, something to pass on.”  His son and daughter, like the heart, are always included in his mosaic paintings in some form.  He thought, “If I am a poor artist with no money or home to pass on to them, at least they will have my work.”  Now, he is impelled to “create and create and create.  I wake up in the morning and I go to my work.”

Having lived in LA for more than thirty years, his art has emerged in widely varied arenas.  The same woman who introduced him to painting taught art to incarcerated adults.  “Art saves lives,” she told him, and it was then that Raphael put down his champion tennis raquet.  He became a social worker and artist.  His art has often voiced political concerns.  In the late 70’s, for example, Governor Wilson had cut “General Relief” programs for the homeless.  In response, Raphael began testing political symbols in his work, the American flag and governmental figureheads in “The United States of Hypocrisy.”  His work back then was banned, only to be followed by the censorship era of the 1980’s.  Raphael unabashedly expresses his opinions as to LA’s present-day follies, “To be a city that has so much money, but such high unemployment rates and foreclosures.  It’s a horrible time for the arts in LA, and yet the best time for art.  Artists have to produce more to sell more, to have food on the table.  Maybe artists have more time to soul search.”

Even if Raphael has a sense that all art may be inherently political, I find myself coming full circle to the personal/experiential qualities of Raphael Matias’ art.  I don’t know that I’ve met an artist in quite a while who speaks so candidly in regards to his work as something therapeutic, as so entirely related to his inner life, his love relationships, his heartbreaks, his healing, his children.  “It’s all through feeling,” he assertively confesses, “If something changes in me, I’ll scrape the beads off the canvas, even if it’s taken me months to put them down.  I don’t care, it has to feel true to me.”  I wonder how many of us living in this city would be so brave.  He feels some discomfort at offering advice to other artists who may need it, but simply offers, “Try to remain close to your heart.  Make the time.  Find the time to find your voice.  We are here for such a short time and we wanna leave something behind.”