The art of relinquishing control: 5 Questions for artist Matthew Palladino
Palladino discusses his work and its connection to psychedelics.
Matthew Palladino was born in 1985 in San Francisco’s Haight neighborhood, which a couple decades earlier had been the epicenter of the city’s psychedelic scene. “I was pounded with psychedelic art before I even knew what psychedelics were,” he says. Palladino started drawing in his youth, and his mother, who studied poetry, encouraged him. He also painted and graffitied city infrastructure with friends as a teenager. He took his first large dose of psilocybin during those years too, an experience he said led him to stop smoking.
After high school, Palladino went to California College of Arts in Oakland for two years before dropping out. For a time, he moved back in with his parents in San Francisco, and as the city became more expensive, he left in search of cheaper rent. His first stop was Philadelphia, where he found a garage studio space for $50 a month. During these years he honed his distinct watercolor painting style and plaster-relief wall sculptures. Eventually, he moved to Queens, working out of a studio next to a tortilla factory. By the time the factory closed and a high-end craft brewery opened down the street, he knew it was time to leave New York. Shortly before the COVID pandemic hit, Palladino and his partner moved to La Paz, Bolivia, to be closer to his partner’s family.
Palladino’s work has now been shown in San Francisco and New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired one of his pieces. More recently, he created a limited edition piece for the Grateful Dead, and his work was featured on the cover of the first issue of Elastic, a psychedelic art and literature magazine. The Microdose spoke with Palladino about his work and its connection to psychedelics.
You got into both art and psychedelics at a young age. How did the two intersect for you?
My friend who I did mushrooms with for the first time said, “You can draw, but can you do graffiti?” I admired graffiti when I was younger, but I hadn’t tried it – so we went to go tag the tunnels. That was kind of my entrée into art being a communal experience, and it became my obsession, to go out and have adventures while making art.
Then, later on, I discovered that if I painted on little canvases I could sell my work on Haight Street for $10 or $15. It was thrilling to encounter so many different kinds of people checking out my art; there were often people who would offer to trade drugs for paintings. In art it’s looked down upon to be making things just for the money but that was exciting at the time. By the end of the day I’d end up with like $35 to buy more weed or burritos. Shrooms, however, were more of a special occasion; my friends and I would sneak into the arboretum by jumping a wall in the back and just hang out there.
How would you define "psychedelic art"? Do you consider your work to be psychedelic?
I definitely use psychedelic tropes in my work, but I don’t think of it as necessarily psychedelic art. They're not the result of me being purposefully “trippy” — they’re more like memories. People have said some of my paintings look like a DMT experience, but I've never done DMT.
When I think of psychedelic art, I think about the first time I did mushrooms, or my first real acid trip, where the experience really shifted how I looked at and thought about things. Really good art is psychedelic, not in the way it looks, but in that it changes your perception and has some lasting effect on your perspective.
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What themes or mediums have you been exploring lately?
I’m really into watercolor. It’s funny, a lot of my early work were these large watercolors, and then I felt a pressure to move into different mediums. I did some large 3D relief works, which were almost sculptural, and showed those in galleries. But when I moved to Bolivia, I didn’t have a studio or tools, so during the pandemic, I got back into watercolors. One of those is in Elastic. I call them my “room” paintings, which are a representation of my memories and current events, and arranging them into a room like a curiosity cabinet. Some of it has been inspired by the chaos here in Bolivia that has taken place since we moved here, like the president trying to run for an illegal third term.
With watercolors, you’re putting wet into wet — you have a little control, but mostly you have to relinquish it. Like usually, if you’re creating more realistic work, faces need to be particular: if just one thing is off, it looks wrong. But with watercolors, faces have to just be approximations; the paint just bleeds too much. In my room paintings, some of the faces look gaunt or scary - I liked that they just reveal themselves and end up being what they are. That acceptance is kind of like how with psychedelics, you can control your set and setting, but once everything’s wet, things will just happen and you’re along for the ride. All you can do is hope for the best and learn from it, and accept whatever happens.
Elastic is meant to be a magazine that redefines the idea of psychedelic art, how did your work come to be the cover for the first issue?
The Elastic team contacted me, saying that they didn’t have a huge budget but wanted to offer me some money to make some art for this new project. That started the conversation and they came at it with exactly the right energy. As I talked to them more, I was really excited about the project.
And one fun, trippy detail: the writer Aimee Bender has fiction in the magazine, and she was my grade school English teacher. I was like, “Could that be the same Aimee Bender?” And somehow it was.
What was the inspiration for the cover art?
My wife collects plants, and the San Pedro cactus, the plant on that cover, is common here. We visited the city of Cusco, where I actually tried San Pedro, which contains mescaline. I had never tried that before, and it was the first time I had visions of something that was fully not there; that had never happened to me with other psychedelics. While looking at the clouds, I saw warriors in full traditional dress, wrestling and tumbling. And then for the cover, there was a story in the collection that was about teeth, so I added those. I actually did a series of these paintings; the cacti became a sort of totem. They’d always looked to me like old gods, full of wisdom.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
