Matthew Deleget

Ghost Paintings, 2007
Fluorescent and metallic spray paint on paper
10 x 15 inches each

Abstract Realities
University of Southern Queensland Gallery, Toowoomba, Australia, 2009

In September 2007, I was invited for a month-long residency at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, located next to historic St. Mary’s City, the site of the first settlement in the colony of Maryland. It is also near a former Union Army prison where literaly thousands of Confederate soldiers died in captivity during the Civil War. This area of Maryland is rife with personal histories.

The college generously provided me with a furnished house and a private studio on a large plot of land next to the first road built in the colony (it looked like Sleepy Hollow). What the college failed to me tell me, however, which I quickly learned, was that the house was haunted. Now I’m not a superstitious person, but after countless uncanny experiences at the house — dishes rattling in the dish rack in front of me, shadows moving across walls, the television turning on and off unexplicably, etc. — I reached the following conclusion. The most rational explanation was that the house was haunted.

In response, I focused the duration of my residency on making paintings for ghosts. Abstract paintings for an abstract audience. I used vaporized paint (spray paint) in fluorescent and metallic colors on paper. The works were one-offs, immediate, and unedited.