Max Mathias

I am a London Based Artist, I’ve been making art for as long as I can remember. By the time I was eighteen, I was drawing large‑scale portraits for interior designers. It was a strange introduction to the art world — successful on paper, but something about it never sat right with me. Commissioned portraiture started to feel less like creating and more like performing a skill on demand. I realised I wasn’t being an artist; I was being a craftsman hired to reproduce someone else’s vision.
At the same time, I was navigating life as a neurodivergent person in environments where communication felt overly complicated and hard to follow. Traditional education, including art school, didn’t make sense to me. Instead of forcing myself into a system that didn’t fit, I built my own path. I started a business to learn how people communicate — how they negotiate, how they structure ideas, how meaning is built between them.
That decision ended up shaping my art more than any formal training could have. Moving away from portrait commissions opened the door to a more expressionist, abstract way of working — one that feels honest, instinctive, and entirely my own. The clarity I had to fight for in conversation shows up in my paintings as bold colou...

Plymouth College of Art