It feels good to give objects a new home and repurpose them into something unique and beautiful. One of my favorite parts of collage is the use of pre-existing materials. I require reference material for both forms of collage, whether it be public domain images I find on the web or vintage source material like postcards and books. I also make analog collages where sharp blades and rubber cement are my main tools. “It’s indispensable to me and has no substitute. The primary tool of McCarthy’s trade is Photoshop. It was a gorgeously rendered tattoo of one of my trippy cat collages featuring a white cat with three bright red mouths, and it is placed squarely on the side of someone’s butt.” To date it’s the only one of my pieces to be tattooed on someone that I know of. A tattoo artist in Russia posted a picture of a piece of mine they had recently put on a customer. One thing I didn’t think would ever happen did happen last year though. There’s been, “nothing too weird or interesting to speak of in the form of requests… yet. “A tattoo artist in Russia posted a picture of a piece of mine they had recently put on a customer.” I had been searching for a niche in the art world, and the cats gave me that.” They seemed like the perfect subjects upon which I could impart my own feelings about the world, and I began using them exclusively. Soon they were extra lethargic, stubborn, and opinionated. I wondered how they would react if my wife and I were the size of insects? While those pieces were initially threatening, I noticed that by amplifying the cats’ size, I was amplifying all of their emotions. The idea for the giant cat pieces came from watching our cats at the time ‘play’ with an insect who came into our house. When I got into collage, the cats also worked their way into my practice as they tend to do. There’s something about their nature and independence that I admire, and I like using them as a surrogate for my own feelings. “Cats have always been a favorite subject of mine, and when I was working as an illustrator I eventually found myself drawing them more than anything else.

We’ve placed well in some major competitions and are currently searching for representation in anticipation of selling one of our scripts in the future.

I also write horror screenplays with my wife. “Like most creatives nowadays, I have lots of different jobs including client work, licensing, and my shop. “I’m best known for using cats as my primary subject matter, and more specifically for my pieces featuring giant cats in cities and landscapes. Matt McCarthy is a collage artist working in both the analog and digital mediums.

Cats in window collage throw