Processing Chaos: Matthew Gerring

Matthew is an artist working in the San Francisco Bay Area primarily working in the intersection of painting, drawing, and textile art. He holds degrees from the Maryland Institute College of Art and the California College of Arts and Crafts (Now CCA, long live craft!) in studio art. He was in the 2005 class at Skowhegan School in Maine, and held a residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts here in the Bay Area.

The last twenty years have been dedicated to improving his various crafts and teaching textiles, color theory and practice to students of all ages. Showing art was held back by a worsening depression that made the act of discussing the artworks he made all but impossible. The disease came with social anxiety around the work he was constantly making which led to many works being overpainted or destroyed.

In 2022 he was hospitalized for the symptoms of decades of untreated depression and nearly lost his life like so many other brilliant artists through the years. This current work was made after he began to come to grips with what depression is, what it means, and how to create artworks about or in spite of the disease.