Illustrator Matt Leines’ “classy” new publication

Date
4 September 2017

Brooklyn based art director Matt Leines makes the kind of work that puts a smile on our faces — even when it’s Monday morning. His highly detailed paintings and drawings revel in complexity, acid trip geometry and monstrous headless characters. Last week, Zurich-based independent publishing house Nieves published Vignettes from the Zenith City Archives, a book of 28 pages of drawings made by Matt over the past few years.

“I had been working mostly on acrylic paintings for a bunch of years and by accident I got back into making ink drawings, wanting to make some quicker work,” Matt explains of the drawings which fill the book’s pages. “I started working with coloured pencils for the first time and this series started to snowball. The quickness didn’t exactly pan out as I got really into the rendering the coloured pencils allowed and demanded. It ended up being pretty time intensive. This book is a survey of the best of this body of work.”

When asked how the drawings fit into his body of work, Matt notes that “in some ways this is a return to more narrative based work I had been making a while back. A lot of the images are like snap shots of specific scenes that take place in this imaginary place of Zenith City. A ceremony, some folks on parade, men installing equipment, animals, etc. But it also shows a lot more variety then my older narrative drawings used to entail. I’ve been trying to pay respect to a lot of the things I love culturally and I think that shows in these pictures.”

“I can’t describe how happy I am with how this book turned out,” he adds. “The printing really captures the drawings. And the gold embossed text looks classy as fuck.”

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Matt Leines: Vignettes from the Zenith City Archives

Above

Matt Leines: Vignettes from the Zenith City Archives

Above

Matt Leines: Vignettes from the Zenith City Archives

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About the Author

Bryony Stone

Bryony joined It's Nice That as Deputy Editor in August 2016, following roles at Mother, Secret Cinema, LAW, Rollacoaster and Wonderland. She later became Acting Editor at It's Nice That, before leaving in late 2018.

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