Smorgasbord

Matt O'Meara was born in Cedar Rapids in 1950. He now lives on an island in Washington state. O'Meara started drawing or "painting" with pastels while living in Alaska in the 1970s, and continues to enjoy working in this medium. These paintings rarely begin with any fixed idea of what eventually appears (although many turn out to be human or animal caricatures, and less often, geometric shapes). Typically O'Meara begins with an idea of several colors that correlate well together. He draws an enclosed, random shape somewhere in the middle, and lets the process evolve from there.