Thurs­day Round Up will return next week! Sorry, guys!

If you’ve been read­ing this blog long enough, you’ve prob­a­bly come to real­ize my affin­ity for nar­ra­tives and sto­ries. Matt Leines is an artist who has cre­ated a world he nar­rates to us, the out­siders, from an insider’s point of view.

Matt depicts a cul­ture full of burly, mus­tached men and beasts alike. They take voy­ages on the sea and nav­i­gate through a world full of faces. There is a per­son­al­ity to every­thing, and the unblink­ing, full-pupil eyes give the work a feel­ing of rest­less­ness. The bouts of vio­lence sprin­kled in Matt’s work seems like it sprouts from the defen­sive that all of these char­ac­ters have assumed.

Visu­ally very flat, the amount of detail in each beard, arti­cle of cloth­ing, and on every head is meticulous.

Matt’s web­site was under con­struc­tion when I vis­ited it, so all images via Art Slant.