Washington, D.C.-based artist Matt Sesow uses oil paint to build fast, gestural compositions, returning to figures and recurring symbols that reflect a sustained engagement with memory and lived experience.

• Matt’s work is rooted in his lived experience as a disabled artist, transforming a childhood accident into a lifelong painting practice grounded in healing and self-definition.
• His expressive style — marked by gestural brushwork, distorted figures, and recurring symbols — creates a visual language for trauma, resilience, and shared human experience.
• Working with his non-dominant hand, Matt embraces immediacy and imperfection, allowing instinct and physicality to drive each composition.
• Through ArtLifting, Matt has expanded the reach of his work into new environments while deepening his connection to a broader disability community and shared mission.

Washington, D.C.-based artist Matt Sesow creates paintings defined by urgent brushwork, strong color, and a distinctly personal visual language. His work often centers on the human figure — fragmented, exaggerated, or reduced to simplified forms — where faces and bodies appear distorted or unsettled.

Matt’s approach to painting is immediate and physical. Working quickly and intuitively, he builds compositions through layered marks and instinctive gestures, using oil and acrylic paint to create work that feels visceral and immediate. Faces and forms emerge through this process, often shifting or breaking apart, returning to similar figures across his work.

Matt’s lived experience is inseparable from his practice. After a childhood accident that resulted in the loss of his dominant hand, he taught himself to paint with his non-dominant hand — an adjustment that continues to shape the movement and pace of his practice today.

Early encounters with art also played a formative role in shaping his visual language. As a child, visits to the Salvador Dalí Museum and later exposure to Picasso’s Guernica left a lasting impression — particularly the scale, emotional intensity, and ability of painting to hold and communicate trauma. These experiences continue to echo in his work, where distortion, repetition, and symbolic forms create space for complex emotional narratives.

Across his work, recurring symbols and icons form a deeply personal visual language. Motifs such as a phantom hand, trauma scars, and jagged figures appear and reappear — each acting as a way to process lived experience and translate emotion into form. Over time, these symbols have evolved alongside his practice, allowing his work to move between the deeply personal and broader reflections on society, often informed by current events and the intensity of living and working in Washington, D.C.

“Art has given me a language that goes beyond words, allowing me to connect with others who have faced their own challenges and to offer a sense of shared understanding and hope.”

What makes your creative process uniquely yours?

My process is consistent and daily. Beginning in 1994, I painted out of a small 550-square-foot studio in Washington, D.C., where I'd pulled out the stove to make more room for canvases, cooking by hotplate and microwave. Fellow D.C. artist Dana Ellyn and I married in 2010, but I stayed in that small studio another seven years — painting all the time was the priority. I finally moved in with her at our place (a slightly larger one-bedroom) in downtown D.C. in 2017, and now we both paint here every day with tall bookcases separating our working spaces.

I'm self-taught, and I paint right-handed because my left arm ends at the elbow. I had an art agent who discovered me early on, from 1995 to 2000, and I've shown in plenty of places around the globe — Barcelona, France, Australia, universities, galleries, and a variety of museums, including the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, which displays over twenty of my pieces in its permanent collection. I sell directly to collectors  — over 17,000 original paintings in more than 40 countries so far.

That direct-to-people model was inspired by the "do it yourself" culture of the bands I followed growing up, and from finding Art Spiegelman's Raw Magazine in a Lincoln, Nebraska record store as a kid: the idea that you make it, you ship it, you don't ask permission. I usually have several paintings going at once, and a small cast of recurring icons and symbols — a bull, a bird, jagged-toothed faces, what I call a trauma cup — that showed up early and stayed. I leave myself in each piece.

What life experiences most deeply influence your work?

The obvious one: at eight years old in 1975, playing a ball game on a grassy Nebraska airstrip, I didn't see a small airplane landing silently, and its propeller severed my dominant left arm above the elbow. Doctors reattached the arm, but the hand had to be amputated after the blood flow didn't return. 

For nearly twenty years afterward, I had nightmares about it. In 1994, I started painting, and the nightmares stopped soon after. I've come to see that accident as something bigger than my own story — we have all been hit by an airplane at some time in our lives, a moment that splits everything into before and after. For some of us, it also opens a door to heal, grow, and thrive. My paintings try to speak honestly to that, without pretending the scars aren't there.

Everything else layers on top. Growing up in rural Nebraska. The 1990s, working in software engineering at the beginning of the internet, with IBM, Netscape, and AOL. My early thirties with the Peace Corps in the Solomon Islands, teaching science classes. And the last thirty-plus years in DC — the art and political energy, the history, the world's focus on the neighborhood where I live and paint.

How has sharing your work through ArtLifting changed your art or your life?

ArtLifting has put my paintings in front of audiences I couldn't reach on my own — corporate collections, lobbies, offices, spaces where someone encounters a painting because of where they work, not because they've been following me on Instagram. That's a different kind of collector and a different kind of conversation, and I've loved watching it happen.

What's meant just as much is the community. For thirty years, I've called myself a self-taught artist — I didn't frame my story around disability. ArtLifting has let me sit inside a community of artists who share a form of lived experience, and it's made me think more generously about what that word means and who it can include.

More recently, I've started exploring with ArtLifting the idea of sharing my story beyond the painting — walking people through my process, my inspiration, and how my iconography is pulled from my challenges, healing, and evolution, with the idea that participants develop personal symbols of their own based on their lived experiences. I've always wanted my story to be useful to other people, not just looked at. ArtLifting has made it possible for the story to travel into rooms I couldn't have gotten into on my own.

Artwork 1: Entanglement
Artwork 2: Bloom
Artwork 3: Fitting In
Artwork 4: Long View

What do you hope stays with someone after they experience your work?

I hope they see themselves in it somewhere. A face, a bull, a bird, a small figure in the middle of something bigger — whatever stops them. We've all been hit by an airplane at some point in our lives, and that isn't despair — it's a kind of permission. A reminder that scars are not a reason to disappear. If someone walks away from one of my paintings feeling a little less alone in whatever they're carrying — or quietly deciding that they are allowed to make something with their own hands out of whatever happened to them — that's everything. And if they take it home and live with it for the next forty years, that's the rest of everything.

Artwork 1: Thrive
Artwork 2: Washington, DC (Cherry Blossoms)
Artwork 3: Collective Harmony
Artwork 4: Harmonic
Artwork 5: Uplifting

Through his partnership with ArtLifting, Matt Sesow has expanded the reach of his work beyond the studio, bringing his paintings into corporate, healthcare, and public environments where they are encountered in the rhythm of everyday life. His expressive figures and symbolic language create moments of pause and recognition—inviting viewers into a more personal, emotional dialogue within shared spaces.

As his work continues to circulate globally, Matt’s paintings carry forward a consistent intention: to make visible the complexity of lived experience and create space for connection, reflection, and resilience, grounded in a daily practice that continues to evolve.

Keep up with Matt on Instagram as his practice continues to grow and evolve.