Little Rock artist Matt McLeod followed his passion from the advertising industry to the art world

Story By Matt McNair, Photography By Sara Reeves

If you’ve spent much time at all in downtown Little Rock, you’ve no doubt seen Matt McLeod’s work. A fixture in Arkansas’s art scene for years, his pieces have hung on many a gallery wall in The Natural State, including for a time in his own downtown gallery; housed in the Arkansas Building, it was an early anchor on that stretch of Main Street between Riverfront and SOMA during a time when downtown Little Rock’s ongoing renaissance was really picking up steam.

His gallery is gone, replaced by another artist’s boutique and the space now flanked by an eclectic mix of galleries and services and shops, but McLeod’s presence remains, and that’s where you’ve seen his work if you’ve ever been down there, even if you’ve never set foot inside an art gallery.

It’s those great big koi, giant goldfish-looking carp swimming through a neon-bright hyperreal metallic pond, all shimmering across the north-facing entirety of the building that currently houses Oak Forest Vintage (purveyor of clothing and relics from the now-long-ago 1980s, impossibly bright and neon like the McLeod-authored fishpond on the side of their building), and that once, some years ago now but for many years just the same, was home to the legendary Bennett’s Military Supplies.

I’ve wondered for years why McLeod didn’t paint catfish on the side of that building and was determined to ask once given the chance to interview him for this piece, but the question slipped my mind the second I walked into his studio and found myself fully transported by the first painting I saw, one that utilized that same incredibly sharp color palette to depict a northern landscape (I guessed Canada, it turned out to be Montana) so achingly real the air seemed to smell of spruce.

Admirably enough, that seemed the only finished work of his own displayed in the home studio he inhabits in a wooded, hilly area of Little Rock, the rest being interesting works by other artists, art he’s either acquired or received through the years. That’s not to say his own work is not in sight, but that his own work is just that: work. Work in progress, work in various stages and forms.

“I paint every day,” he says, stressing the importance of putting in the hard work of honing one’s craft, while also noting that up-and-coming artists can be thwarted by the most unartistic of realities: paying the bills.

“When artists fail, it’s because they run out of cash,” he says, noting that even today, as a successful full-time working artist, he maintains another business venture unrelated to painting. “It’s saved my bacon multiple times,” he insists, adding that he advises any aspiring artist to maintain multiple streams of revenue — waiting tables, working retail, anything at all — in order to have enough money coming in, and coming in steadily, to keep a roof over their easel.

“Put out a lot of traps,” he says, using an apt metaphor, purposefully or not, for this publication. “Figure out a way to bring it in somewhere. Eat what you kill and store away the rest.”

Before he main-tained a business venture as a financial backstop for his art, McLeod lived his life the other way around, knocking about the workaday world and keeping art as a hobby. That work, however, was at least art-adjacent: After graduating from Southern Methodist University in 1987, McLeod landed a job with Tracey-Locke, a large advertising firm. But “art-adjacent” is not “art,” of course, and while the firm’s creative teams were busy creating and composing high-stakes ad campaigns — they had the Pepsi Cola account during the so-called “cola wars” — McLeod was on the media communication side of the business, looking at cost-benefit ratios of ad buys and, he says, “basically crunching numbers.”

“For me,
art was my greatest gift.
And I was neglecting it as a hobby.”

While crunching numbers to optimize the effectiveness of an ad campaign’s rollout was not the career he had in mind when he went off to college, the advertising business itself was; he just imagined himself on a team dreaming up clever ads, not totting up ledger columns related to same. But he quickly found that the artistic aspect of advertising — graphic design — was not to his liking. The design classes he had most looked forward to did not dissuade him from the industry, but it did turn him away from what he had hoped would be his creative outlet, as the labor-intensive and rigid demands of pre-digital graphic design did not carry the joy of art for McLeod. Creating a concept was all well and good, but the execution of that concept was a slog of cutouts and layouts, with any mistake more or less sending the would-be designer back to square one.

By that same token, the form precluded improvisation of any kind. Shifting gears in the middle of a project would necessitate a do-over just the same as fouling it up, and it was this frustration, as much or more than any other aspect, that McLeod found untenable.

“It was not forgiving of changes,” he says of graphic design before the form pivoted to digital tools. And while that would happen even as McLeod was entering the industry, he had finished up his degree without the portfolio that might have afforded him the ability to make the transition to digital design on the job. “I did not build a portfolio,” he says of his focus on media communication after becoming disenchanted by the design classes, and so, he continues, “I never got a chance to go into the creative department because I did not have a portfolio.”

“I kind of fell through the cracks,” he says.

He didn’t fall too far though, and after a few years working in Dallas he landed an offer from the Arkansas advertising firm Cranford Johnson Robinson (now CJRW), which allowed him to continue his career in Little Rock, his hometown.

“Neat people,” he says of the venerable agency’s principals, recalling his time there fondly. “Nothing but respect for them.” And while he was happy to be back home after his years in Texas, and though he liked his work and the people he worked for, McLeod felt like something was missing.

“All of these people that were my age were landing in Little Rock from the UA [University of Arkansas],” says the SMU grad, “and they all knew each other, and they didn’t really know me that well.” Finding it difficult to ingratiate himself with a peer cohort made up, for the most part, of friends from college, McLeod was looking for something to occupy his off-work hours.

“I just decided I needed a hobby,” he says. “I needed something to do after work.”

“Theres been some really great people in my life…really great parents that supported me, and some professional people that really helped me make that transition.”

Happy (little trees) Hour

As a child, McLeod spent his days outside playing sports or roaming the woods around his house. But when the weather turned bad and kept him indoors, he enjoyed painting with a watercolor set his mother had given him; with those happy hours in mind — rather than the after-work kind he’d been skipping anyway — he headed to the Arkansas Arts Center (now the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts) and signed up for evening art classes.

“I just loved it right away,” he says of drawing, painting, and attending classes during those after-work hours; and as he progressed in his studies, he began to find more fulfillment in front of the easel than he did in front of advertising reports. Advertising was his job, which he liked, and painting was just his hobby; though at the same time, painting began to feel like something more. “I was,” he says, “falling in love with my hobby.”

“And that all comes to a head,” he says of the process wherein his hobby began to outrank his vocation, “right after 9/11.”

McLeod recalls himself and “millions of other people” facing a new reality, an existential shift in everyday life that compelled a reassessment of just about everything that comprised everyday life. And like a lot of other folks, he began to think about what it was he’d like to do with the rest of his time on Earth besides just surviving. “The days after that shock,” he says of the attacks and their aftermath, “were days of taking stock.”

“What was important? What was I doing? And did I really want to be doing it? Why am I leaving this hobby, that I love, only a couple of hours a night a few nights a week?” Deep down he knew the answer: He was an artist, and so he needed to somehow truly become an artist.

“I knew I needed to do it,” he says of becoming a full-time, working artist. “I just needed to find a way to do it.”

Having made his decision, McLeod was determined to make the leap, but — as he is quick to point out in his advice to hopeful professional artists — there were bills to be paid, as there always will be. He was at this point working with another Little Rock advertising agency, Thoma Thoma, and despite his epiphany wasn’t ready to give up a steady paycheck. Fate intervened once again, however, as a series of acquisitions resulted in downsizing at Thoma Thoma; McLeod’s position was among those to be eliminated. When the boss called him in to break the news, McLeod took it well and told his now-former employer that it seemed as if “God or the universe” was telling him to become an artist.

The man holding the pink slip agreed.

“I think you’d be a really great artist,” McLeod recalls him saying, before adding a caveat. “And I want you to go be an artist right now. So I’m going to pay you for the rest of this month, but you leave right now and go start becoming an artist.”

So McLeod did just that, and while the rest is indeed history, as they say, to say it in this case is a little too neat, a little too pat.

“I’d love to tell you it’s been easy,” McLeod says of the journey from hobbyist to professional, “but it’s not.”

Realizing all too well that he had been presented with a choice and a cosmic nudge tantamount to spiritual revelation — “I have my own faith, and I believe God was moving in that moment,” he says of his existential crossroad — he first set about making sure he had other ways of making enough money to keep the lights on as he established his practice, but in the main leaned headfirst and headlong into his art. And even now, though he is allowing himself to ease off the hustle a bit as he enters his sixth decade (as of this writing, he has a formal installation in only one gallery), he maintains a professional’s discipline, painting every day and always receptive to whatever inspiration might come for the next piece.

Inspiration can come from anywhere, but for McLeod it very often comes from the outdoors. While he honed his personal style in the Great North (studying under Canadian artist Mike Svob) and draws on that landscape for some of his most striking art — e.g., the painting that so grabbed me when I visited McLeod’s studio, which is titled “Mirror Lake” and happens to grace the cover of this issue — it is the out-of-doors within The Natural State that provides the most ready fodder for his imagination and canvas.

“I love to ride my bike, go for hikes, do anything outside; I’ve taken pictures from my kayak,” he says of his process, which most often begins with a simple sojourn through nature, sketch pad or camera in hand. Be it backcountry or backyard, he says, “I just like being outdoors and doing stuff.”

On the day I visited him, McLeod’s newest work, “Duck Dog,” was up on the easel. Though unfinished, it possessed enough life for even the most unschooled observer (present author very much included, though McLeod did his best to give me a brief primer on art theory during our visit) to perceive a thrilling sense of life and movement, the swoop of feather and sharp slope of snout seeming to flow and breathe as a well-trained Labrador comes up out of the bayou with his prize.

“I have a fascination with working dogs,” says McLeod by way of explaining one of his favorite subjects.

It’s a sentiment with which a great number of our readers would no doubt agree. Even for those who don’t have a good working concept of what a good working dog — in this case a duck dog, but in any case a working dog bred for its work no matter the task — McLeod’s goal for this painting, as with all of his art, is to engage the audience to such a degree that “they feel what it was that I was feeling” when the idea came to him, a connection that, according to McLeod, “kind of completes the cycle.”

In McLeod’s tree-canopied studio — part workroom, part showroom, part living room — one gets the feeling that, for him at least, the cycle has definitely been completed, or is at the very least rounding into form. From portraits of things familiar to most folks around here (Ozark farmsteads, happy and determined duck dogs) to some things that are maybe not so familiar (that vibrant, humidity-free Montana landscape), McLeod seems very aware that he is blessed in the ability to take it all in, and to make his way in the world by showing it to others through his talent and his distinct, vibrant style.

“We have a beautiful country,” he says, summing up his thoughts on inspiration and his duty to act on it and, through his art, convey it to others. “And we have a beautiful globe.”

Matt McLeod’s work is currently on display at Art Group Gallery in Little Rock (www.artgrouparkansas.com), and can be found online at www.mattmcleod.com.