My oldest, Mathew, is a professional visual artist with a studio in Northeast Minneapolis and is known to most as Mat.
Mat grew up in Winsted and Waverly and knew from an early age he was meant to be an artist, so he set out to pursue that calling.
As a boy, he often tagged along with his grandparents to Red’s Cafe in Montrose, a Wright County gathering spot for local town dwellers and over-the-road truckers who pulled off Highway 12 for soup and a sandwich.
“My grandpa was a farmer, and he would sit in a booth with his buddies in their flannel shirts and shoot the breeze,” Mat recalled.
Growing up, he learned to paint by watching Bob Ross and Bill Alexander on PBS and by subscribing to art magazines.
As a junior in 2000, he enrolled at the Perpich Center for Arts Education, a public arts high school in Golden Valley named after former Gov. Rudy Perpich, where 11th and 12th-grade students study visual arts, music, dance, theater, literary arts, and media arts.
At Perpich, his artistic horizons widened considerably.
Mat later reflected that the school gave him “the confidence and the guidance I needed to follow my dreams . . . of being the next Bob Ross, until Craig Farmer taught me that there were other, better artists and so much incredible artwork that I could be inspired by.”
Upon graduating in 2002, his Perpich portfolio had earned him acceptance to the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, CT, but he deferred enrollment twice while continuing to develop his artistic style.
Mat ultimately chose the contemporary art education offered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and drawing in 2010.
“Without the education, guidance, and networking MCAD gave me, I’d probably be an accountant or something,” he said of his time there.
While at MCAD, he studied abroad in 2009 at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy.
The semester abroad proved transformative. Standing before Renaissance masterworks he had known only from books, he was overwhelmed by their scale, color, and grandeur.
“The reproductions did nothing to prepare me for how the originals looked in the flesh,” he said.
Returning to Minneapolis from Italy, he found his artistic direction permanently changed.
After graduating from MCAD in 2010, Mat landed his first major commission when the Minneapolis law firm Ogletree Deakins found his work on the MCAD website.
He created a single lobby painting, and the firm liked it so much it asked him to produce artwork for the entire office, launching his professional career.
The commissions grew quickly from there.
In 2012, he contributed original artwork to the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis’s $25 million renovation, creating several works for the lobby, private dining room, and guest rooms.
Most notably, a richly layered print of the iconic Gold Medal Flour building overlooking the Mississippi River was placed in 250 rooms to give guests a deeply local sense of place, and a June 23, 2012, Star Tribune article singled out his work among the original artwork in the remodeled rooms.
For the hotel’s grand main hallway, working alongside Stonehill & Taylor, he painted three sweeping canvases drawn from Minneapolis’s rugged and storied lumber heritage.
His work from this period was also featured in the May 2012 issue of Lodging Magazine.
More commissions followed.
In 2013, he painted a 20-by-72-inch view of the Minneapolis skyline for the clubroom of the Millennium Hotel in Minneapolis.
In 2016, he designed a 14-foot dimensional installation of 23 individual canvases for software company Code42 and created original artwork for Omni Brewing in Maple Grove.
His paintings reached the auction block, too, presented by Christie’s auctioneers at the annual MCAD fundraiser “The Auction at MCAD” in 2015 and 2016.
Recognition came alongside the commissions.
Gov. Mark Dayton appointed him to the Perpich Center for Arts Education board of directors in January 2014, a role he held for two terms until January 2023, and his career was profiled on the Curious North podcast that same month.
Mat is known for his Minnesota diner series, 10 original collage‑style paintings crafted to honor and preserve cafe culture in the state’s small towns and neighborhoods.
In a distinctive finishing touch, each completed painting was hung in the very diner that inspired it.
Red’s Cafe, one of the diners in the series, was a longtime favorite of former US Sen. and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who lived in Waverly and served as vice president under President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Mat also painted a portrait of Humphrey as part of the Red’s Cafe piece.
“The diners I selected are local landmarks,” he explained. “Some of them have been around for decades, and one is only about 10 years old, but they all have an atmosphere. I want each picture to evoke a memory: I paint in bits and pieces because that’s the way we see the world.”
With a 2016 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Mat spent the summer traveling the state with his Nikon camera and sketchbook.
Visiting Main Street diners across the state, he took photos to inform his painting compositions.
“I was looking for places that had a nostalgic spirit, and they all had to have that diner smell: grease, coffee, grilled onions, with just a tinge of bleach,” Mat said.
Using the Twitter hashtag “#mnArtHunt” and his website, , he encouraged diner lovers to travel from one diner to the next to collect a free postcard at each location.
The participating diners included The Barn in Brainerd, Bev’s Cafe in Red Wing, Lange’s Cafe in Pipestone, Red’s Cafe in Montrose and The Viking Cafe in Fergus Falls, among others.
“Minnesota artist hopes to save cafe culture one painting at a time” is the title of a Jan. 10, 2017 Minneapolis Star Tribune article, with a subtitle “To introduce Main Street diners to a new clientele, a Minneapolis painter [Mat] has created an artsy scavenger hunt across the state.”
He received the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant three times, in 2016, 2018, and 2020.
He used the 2018 grant to travel Minnesota’s border with his Nikon camera and sketchbook, while the 2020 project was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2015, one of Mat’s paintings was displayed in the Senate wing of the Minnesota State Capitol as part of the “Minnesotan Moments” exhibition.
In 2017, he received two honors at the Minnesota State Fair: the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts Award and the Minnesota Artist Association Award.
Mat joined a public debate sparked by Minnesota’s 2023 law restricting lead and cadmium in certain consumer products.
As the rules were applied, professional artist paints were swept into the “covered product” list under Minnesota Statutes 325E.3892, which bars the sale of covered products with cadmium above 0.0075 percent by total weight (75 parts per million).
Artists and art-supply stores told local media they only realized the impact when they were suddenly denied access to cadmium-based paints.
Mat said substitutes do not hold up and that the reds and oranges “completely fade away,” adding, “Cadmium is vastly superior.”
He compared the proposed substitutes to “artificial vanilla flavor versus using real vanilla,” and said pigments are “like visual spices in your cabinet.”
Mat described cadmium colors in practical, painter-to-painter terms in a MinnPost article by Sheila Regan Feb. 5, 2025.
“The cadmium line of colors goes from cadmium red deep, which is a really luscious rich red, all the way through the cadmium oranges, to all the cadmium yellows, and cadmium green, which is this really vibrant green. All of the vibrant colors on the palette are cadmiums,” Mat said.
He also challenged the suggestion that artists are a significant source of cadmium pollution.
“The argument I heard was that they’re trying to keep it from waterways, but artists are such a tiny, tiny group of people, and we want that pigment on the canvas,” Mat said.
“We don’t want it down the drains or anything like that,” he concluded.
Minnesota lawmakers ultimately revised the language June 14, 2025, through House File 4 (Chapter 4), exempting professional artists’ materials, including oil and water-based paints, pastels, pigments, ceramic glazes, markers, and encaustics, from the state’s cadmium restrictions.
Mat has explored a concept he calls “anemoia,” a coined term for the feeling of nostalgia for a time one never actually experienced.
Drawing on vintage photographs, illustrations, and design motifs from the 1950s through 1970s, the paintings carry a strange sense of modernity built entirely from nostalgic imagery.
He returned to Perpich as the Sept. 15, 2025, Dedication Day alumni speaker, bringing with him the perspective of someone whose artistic life began there, and told students that his time at the school held “some of the best memories of my childhood.”
“Twenty-five years ago, I was where you are right now: in a new school, in a new city. Scared, but excited. Everything started out right here. Perpich was the key to everything I’ve accomplished. Perpich gave me the confidence, the work ethic, the curiosity, the artistic knowledge, my friends, and the hope and tenacity to follow my dreams and make art my career,” he said.
“You are only starting your journey,” he told them, encouraging them to dedicate themselves not only to Perpich, but also to their own possibilities.
Known for his MetaModern oil paintings, in which bold colors and expressive brushstrokes blend classic techniques with modern ideas, Mat has built a distinctive body of work.
For each painting, he builds the wooden stretcher frame himself and pulls the canvas taut by hand.
Drawing inspiration from local Minnesota landmarks, Mat’s digitally composed neo-cubist works investigate the relationship between computers, image appropriation, and traditional oil painting.
The work reflects an ongoing fascination with memory, reality and perception, often playing with the tension between everyday life, consumer culture and an increasingly virtual world.
Mat’s influences span Cubism, Postmodernism and Relational Aesthetics, and include such artists as Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Alexander Ross, and James Rosenquist.
“Exploiting the ‘slow-think’ granted to the viewing of oil paintings, my artwork attempts to fuse the various experiential elements together to create an illusion of truth,” Mat has said of his work.
Today, Mat works from his own studio at 3104 N. Pacific St. in Northeast Minneapolis, creating original works and taking on commissions.
His paintings are held in notable collections across the country and internationally, including a painting in the permanent collection of the Weisman Art Museum, and are represented by Kickernick Gallery, both in Minneapolis.
More of Mat’s work can be viewed at matollig.com and on his Instagram page at instagram.com/matollig.
As his proud father, I’ve had a front-row seat to Mathew’s art over the course of his lifetime, witnessing the care, skill and dedication he puts into each painting.
