Matt Maust: Collage, Typography and the Art of Reworking

Archive note: This newly written historical account revisits Matt Maust, the subject of Grandpa Style’s earlier Art Maker feature. The original interview and photographs are not reproduced here.

An artist across paper and music

Matt Maust’s visual work brings photographs, painted marks and written language into layered compositions. Dan Yoshii’s artist biography describes a mixed-media practice combining these elements with collage, alongside his work as the bassist in Cold War Kids.

For this archive, the most useful thread is the process: how a photograph, a remembered phrase or an existing piece can become material for something else. Published studio conversations offer a way into that work.

Words, copies and everyday material

In Sean Martin’s February 2017 Amadeus studio feature, Maust connected his early image-making to artwork for demo tapes and the visual language of punk zines. He discussed the photocopier’s ability to flatten material into a cut-and-paste image.

The same feature linked some of his early Cold War Kids artwork to photographs and memories gathered around recording, shows and touring. Personal records could become part of a band’s public visual identity. The online article is a preview of a longer print feature; the observations here come from its publicly available text.

Returning to an unfinished piece

In Jillian Knox Finley’s MyDomaine interview, published on Dwell in September 2016, Maust described spoken conversation as an important source of phrases. He also explained how he might leave a work, return to it later, tear it apart and add something new.

That account makes revision part of the composition itself. An earlier piece can supply the next one, while a sentence detached from its first conversation can take on a different emphasis. The interview describes his approach at that time; it does not establish a fixed recipe for every work.

Reading the layers

Our editorial suggestion is to read a phrase first for its meaning, then look at its size, placement and relationship to the surrounding image. Consider what a crop or repetition makes prominent, and what remains difficult to read. This keeps typography and composition in view together.

A web reproduction can introduce those relationships, while leaving the physical scale and surface of the original uncertain. The source pages above provide further context and images without requiring us to recreate the earlier Grandpa Style gallery.

For another approach to assembled surfaces, read about Russell Leng’s painting and mixed materials, or browse more people and projects in the Archive.