American Artist Matt Story paints striking images that seem at once both photo-realistic and dreamlike. His figurative portraits captures the tranquil inner state of his subject suspended in water, as if in fluid movement through an inner journey. Story worked as a technical illustrator and graphic artist from his early teens, and studied art in the United States and Western Europe. “I try to paint contemporary life as to capture crystals of pristine memory that we all share but never describe to one another.  Each composition uses the gesture of figure or setting to evoke a platonic form, an archetypal notion, a distilled essence, that thing that lasts beyond the moment.”