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Don’t get him wrong. Artist Matthew Cusick loves to paint. He loves just about everything about painting.

 

“I have a great respect and sort of reverence for art history and painting,” said Cusick, now in residence at the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas. “It’s how I was inspired to be an artist, and it’s how I learned to create images.”

 

His work with enamels was accomplished enough that they earned gallery shows in Brooklyn and New York City (where he was born and attended Cooper Union) and attracted the attention of several museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, which owns one of his early paintings.

 

It’s just that the paint itself had no connection to the content of his art.

 

“I just started getting frustrated with the material, the paint,” Cusick said. “I wanted to use some material that had some connection to the subject matter, like a sculptor or conceptual artist might conceive of their work.”

 

So about 10 years ago, Cusick initiated a series of experiments that ultimately led to his preferred medium: maps.

 

He does other “bodies of work,” as he calls them, video pieces and “defacements” (works where he scrapes the words off a pre-existing page), but his primary passion is art made out of maps. Some might call it collage (the International Collage Center also owns examples of his work), but Cusick prefers to call them paintings.

 

“The maps are a surrogate for paint,” he said. “It’s just replacing the paint medium with something else, and it’s really satisfying for me.”

 

Cusick’s “map paintings” — each incorporating hundreds, if not thousands, of hand-cut pieces — are more subtle than you might expect and in their range of hues and Cusick’s handling of color, indeed akin to painting. But on closer examination, the relationship between material and content is evident. His wave works (he’s creating another one while at Lux) largely employ navigational maps, but it’s the selection of the individual elements and the unexpected juxtapositions that create multiple levels of meaning.

 

“I really had a yearning to work with material that had a certain kind of weight to it and had a connection to part of our material world, or our history, and that had nothing to do with art,” Cusick said.

 

Recycling a material that is rapidly becoming obsolete is also attractive to Cusick, who is fascinated by other artists who use common, everyday materials.

 

“Its so innovative, contemporary art these days,” Cusick said. “It used to be everything you’d go see would be painting or sculpture, or something like that. Nowadays, you notice what the artist is doing, the process, the materials, the ideas — everything has kind of been broken open.

 

“Working with maps is sort like my omelet. That’s how I broke the eggs.”