Lyle Matoush:
Recent Work

Exhibition Bio

Lyle Matoush was born and raised in Colorado and earned his BA in art education from Colorado State College at Greeley. After receiving his MA in printmaking at San Francisco State University he apprenticed to master lithographer Ernest de Soto at the Collectors Press in San Francisco, thus beginning to master the collaborative skills he would call upon for the rest of his professional career. He started teaching high school in Paoli, Indiana, (1957-59) and in Klamath Falls (1960-65) until he had an opportunity to instruct at the University of British Columbia (1964-5) in the summers and at Southwestern Oregon Community College in 1966 as guest faculty.

In 1965 he began to develop the printmaking program with Betty LaDuke at what was then Southern Oregon State College, finding presses and old commercial limestones and setting up a teaching studio in an army barrack acquired from White City. He taught other required courses in the Art Department; but concentrated on classes in lithography, relief printing and intaglio, training young artists in these methods until his retirement in 1994. Lyle and Jime Matoush have lived in Ashland for 54 years.

Matoush was part of a cohort of young instructors after WWII who revitalized print-making between the 1950s and ‘70s. Along with Glen Alps at the University of Washington, Seattle, and Gordon Gilkey at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Matoush taught printmaking as an ideal medium to allow art students to explore making multiples of their work while retaining a tactile sense of their original process of creating images. In addition, he was a founding member of the Northwest Print Council, an organization that was founded to support and promote printmakers in the region. This wide and varied association with other printmakers led to a lively exchange of art among them, so that the Matoush Collection mirrors the quality and diversity of printmaking in the Pacific Northwest. A selection of this collection hung in the museum concurrently with his most recent work in pastel. It included works by artists traded or purchased on his travels, at art fairs and elsewhere – and most appropriately – received as remuneration for the printing assistance he gave those artists unfamiliar with the medium who were intent on making editions of their work.

Lyle has long been a supporter of the Rogue Gallery & Art Center started more than forty years ago by Oregon painter Eugene Bennett and other artists in the Medford area. Until the construction of the Schneider Museum of Art in 1986, the Rogue Gallery was the sole venue for bringing art into the Rogue Valley from the whole western region.

The Treehaven and Heiter Galleries exhibited Lyle Matoush’s recent work in pastels. After a lifetime with the heavy presses, stones and rollers of lithography, he had been working in a medium that both excited him and was easier on his back. His own multi-frame photographs were the basis some of this new work full of juxtapositions and formal affinities. The drawings displayed a texture-free surface not often seen in pastels. A skilled draughtsman, Matoush brought to this new work a lifetime of working a smooth sheet of paper so that implied form and texture are created strictly from the quality of the linear and tonal elements he is manipulating. A comparison of this work with his prints will clarify how fundamental color relations are in his art. He’s an audacious colorist, and a collagist of forms whatever medium he uses.

Exhibition Statement

Lyle Matoush is a well-known printmaker in the region. Over the years he has assembled a collection of prints by well-known national and international artists. A selection of these artists were chosen for the exhibition. Lyle Matoush’s work featured his most recent pastels paintings.

Back to Past Exhibitions