MATT SAYERS

 Matt Sayers was born in Cannock but spent much of his childhood in Plymouth, the port city of Devon, from which he garnered his earliest artistic impressions. He was raised to drawing and painting on his father's knee, and as he watched his dad interpret familiar local scenes Matt decided that one day he would do the same. His childhood desire to draw and paint an enduring record of the world around him became a reality when he returned to Staffordshire with his family at the age of 14. His creative eye was moving towards the declining landscape of the mining industry.

​

His early years in Plymouth taught him a strong sense of community spirit, but his vision was about to become all the more apparent. The industrial landscape that surrounded him was reaching out to his emerging talent, and so, he began a journey that would take him to his present-day life as an industrial artist working on his own unique style of social realism.

​

‘I was lucky to move to Cannock in my formative years, it was a time of great emotion, we were experiencing the last days of the mines and things were changing fast. There was a prevailing sense of loss – our working way of life was fading away and we were, in essence, losing our identity.‘

​

Matt’s paintings recall a time which is now consigned to history, but with his gentle humour and an innate eye for detail he gives us a positive and surprisingly vibrant glimpse of the gritty world that was shaped by the people who lived and worked in the post war mining industry.