— Melbourne studio · est. 2022
The Studioof Joshua De Matteo
Rooted in the same obsession with how nature looks, moves, and feels.
About the artist
ARCHITECTURE BY PROFESSION
PAINTING BY PRACTICE.
I'm based in Melbourne, and my practice runs alongside a career in architecture. I've stopped thinking of one as an escape from the other. They're two ways of paying attention to the same world — working at different scales and speeds, and feeding each other more than I used to admit.
Works rarely begin with a fixed plan. Ideas gather slowly — through sketches, photographs, memory and repeated looking — and often sit for months, sometimes years, before they turn into anything. Most of it starts in the landscape and the detail held inside it, though the finished paintings are rarely a direct record of any one place.
Keeping a dedicated practice is part of how I think. It's where I slow down, follow an idea without knowing where it lands, and stay open to the thing I didn't plan.
Each painting asks for time — and gives something different back.
— Joshua
— In my words
Most of what I make, I'd walked past before. The work is what happens when I stop and look again.
The Practice
Observation
Most ideas begin away from the studio — walking, travelling, sketching, or just spending time in a landscape. What stops me is rarely the view itself. It's the detail inside it: the layered surface of a tree, the edge of a waterway, a weathered rock face, the way a colour or pattern repeats across a hillside.
I collect these moments in photographs, sketches and notes. Some stay where I found them. Others keep coming back — and those are the ones that eventually become work.
Process
Ideas rarely move straight from looking into a painting. They get tested first — a sketch here, a digital study there, an oil-pastel attempt that goes nowhere — and most of them sit for a long time before they're ready. Some take months. A few have taken years.
The paintings themselves come by accumulation. I add layers, bury them, pull them back, return weeks later and rework. I'm not painting toward a fixed image; I let each decision answer the one before it — which is usually where the parts I never planned come from.
The Work
The earliest work — a series of detailed drawings made between 2018 and 2019 — is where it started. Subjects from the natural world, built up through pencil, watercolour and digital layering, with an almost obsessive focus on surface and detail. They came out of a quiet, solitary stretch of my life, and the slow, absorbing nature of that work set the pattern for everything since.
From 2022 the practice moved toward large-scale abstract painting, beginning with my first major commission, "Manly Dam." The paintings took those early instincts — layered detail, rhythm, sustained looking — and opened them out into something more immersive: bigger surfaces, more atmosphere, more to stand in front of.
Current Directions
Lately I keep coming back to the things that don't give themselves up at a glance. I'll look at the same patch of bark a dozen times — the way it stacks and peels, the lines worked into the rock behind it — and each time there's something I missed before. The closer I get, the less it looks like the thing I thought I was drawing.
That's the part that keeps pulling me back: how much is hidden inside something ordinary, and how little of it we stop to see. I'll stay with one thing until it starts to come apart — until the bark stops reading as bark and becomes colour, line, rhythm. Abstraction isn't where I start. It's what's left once I've looked long enough.
— The question behind the work
Every piece starts with the same question: what made me stop and look? The work begins when something in the landscape won't let my eye move on — and everything after is an attempt to understand it, stay with it, and translate it.
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