From Matt Luckhurst’s exhibition Newer, Shinier

Calgary-based artist and fourth year Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) visual communications student Matt Luckhurst clearly doesn’t lack the ability to self-motivate. When it’s nice outside and all of his friends are out having a good time, “I’m the guy inside,” Luckhurst says matter-of-factly. With a full-time summer internship at Studio Dialog, two simultaneous exhibitions of his paintings and murals currently on display in Calgary and an August 24 scheduled website launch for his new clothing line (OK Creative Apparel, co-founded with friend Erin Williams), he doesn’t have much of a choice but to stay indoors.
    Luckhurst’s dedication to honing his craft and creating a signature style is all the more apparent in the selection of paintings currently on display at Looks Could Kill Art Boutique. Bold colours, cartoon-like definition and in-your-face close-ups make the paintings pop. Mischievous-looking rotund little men with trunk-like noses, as well as retro robots with caffeine-induced toothful grins fill up most of his painted surfaces. These include wooden wine bottle boxes, skateboards, Vans shoes and one refrigerator door. Appropriately, the man depicted on the refrigerator door is grabbing his bare beer belly and above him “get food’ is written in large block letters.
    This sort of cheeky humour is infused in all of Luckhurst’s work, like three men riding a small plastic pony with short captions such as “ridin dirty.” All jokes aside, Luckhurst insists that there are some serious messages in his work, hidden underneath those glossy finishes. “My paintings always have some sort of social commentary, but not necessarily one that many people pick up on. I try to keep it really fun and goofy but I still keep those underlying ideas.”
    Some of those ideas take form as symbols, and require deciphering to be understood. For example, the acronym “KWYL” appears in many of his paintings and is the artist’s motto. It stands for “kill what you love,” a romantically tragic statement that allows room for interpretation. For Luckhurst, KWYL signifies “loving something so much that you end up rejecting everything else.”
    Also on view at Looks Could Kill are the two winning labels that Luckhurst designed for the Road 13 brand of wine from his family’s Golden Mile Cellars Estate Winery. Trying to epitomize the “young and fun” nature of the wine, the artist designed the labels with a polished but very playful and engaging look. Each one has a Luckhurst-style individual running wildly on a brown-coloured cloudy background that works great with the dark-green colour of the glass. With financial support from ACAD, Luckhurst entered his design in the national Applied Arts Magazine Student Awards and won a coveted spot in its student awards issue.
    The multi-talented Luckhurst is about to undertake an artistic collaboration with Calgary-based artist Lazerfangs, and he will also make vinyl and stuffed animals based on the characters and robots that permeate his work.
    Luckhurst’s designs and paintings will be displayed at Looks Could Kill Art Boutique in Art Central until the end of this month. To see more examples of his new clothing line (www.okcreativeapparel.com), more paintings and some killer murals, stop by the Hifi nightclub, where his work will also be shown until the end of September.