A Look at DJ Matheny's Studio
- Bob Bahr
- Apr 1
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 4
Some things endure.
In the long tradition of painting, portraits of people have been one through-line in art history, as proven by the Fayum portraits, spectacularly alive-looking, done in encaustic, and executed as far back as 100 BCE. Those portraits were centered on the identity of the subject. Less so for the contemporary portraits by Kansas City artist DJ Matheny, who paints "narrative portraits," suggesting a more universal exploration of the human experience. Some of Matheny's narrative portraits are currently on view at Prairie Village City Hall and at the clubhouse at Meadowbrook Park, under the auspices of the Prairie Village Arts Council.
Last year, Matheny shared a show at City Hall with another artist, and in that show, she presented a suite of paintings that explored the breathtaking, wide open skies of Kansas, dripping with rain and sun rays thanks to sprayed water making the water-soluble oil paint run down the canvas. This year, her narrative portraits capture people in contemplation. These paintings are thematically adjacent to her series exploring and updating the myth of Persephone, the Greek goddess of both Spring and the Underworld. In all of these new portraits, we see in the faces of the subjects a reflection of their interior world, their thoughts, feelings, and situations--situations that magnify the ideas and energy explored in their intriguing facial expressions.
The Kansas skies are older than the Fayum portraits, and the studio where Matheny taps into these ageless themes is vintage as well. Matheny has space in the historic Livestock Exchange building in Kansas City's West Bottoms neighborhood. The nine-story stone and brick building can accommodate 200 tenants. The atmosphere there is warm and almost clubby, with plentiful oak trim and drafty offices. The floor where Matheny works is occupied almost entirely by artists, their easels and taborets and shelves of supplies filling what used to be the offices of livestock traders. Matheny's space has large, north-facing windows that provide ideal light for her work. The building has the feel of business being conducted and deals being done, with a lobby area that rivals some old, grand hotels. At the height of its use, more than 160,000 cattle, hogs, sheep, horses, and mules were bought and sold at the livestock exchange in one year.
Matheny's studio is clean and organized, a state that she says reflects the neatness she needed to be a successful designer in earlier years. When she paints from photo reference, she puts a large monitor on her wire rolling rack that's loaded with supplies and wheels it beside her easel. Her glass palette that she uses for mixing colors is situated vertically right next to the painting surface on her easel. "When I'm painting a face where the values are so subtle, the palette needs to be right there beside the canvas so I can see what to mix," says Matheny.
The space is furnished with comfy chairs, bookcases with art books, a salvaged bird's nest, favorite past paintings, and a colorful gumball machine filled with peanut M&Ms. It should be a pleasant workspace, because Matheny spends plenty of time considering the state of current and past paintings and modifying them when she is struck with an idea. One pair of paintings that Matheny showed in last year's City Hall exhibition are almost unrecognizable now that she has tinkered with them. The quest to make the best possible paintings in her style is well addressed by her environment, which reflects her restless, thoughtful imagination and the inherent class in her work and her approach to making art.
Matheny's paintings will be on view at City Hall, on Mission Road, through July 10. Her pieces will be on view at Meadowbrook through May 8. Find out more about the artist at her website, www.djmatheny.com. •
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