August 2024

As a young man, Matthew Peck visited the French Quarter on a whim…and has spent the next 30 years capturing its allure on canvas.

– by Doug Brantley

– photos by Ellis Anderson and courtesy Matthew Peck Gallery

It is said that in New Orleans, three times is the charm; that by their third visit, newcomers are so smitten with the city, they start actively entertaining thoughts of moving here.  For Matthew Peck, it was instantaneous.

“I came on vacation in 1996, when I was 21, with one of my friends from high school,” Peck recalls.  “I didn’t know anything about New Orleans, but when I got here, I suddenly felt like I was home.  It was very strange; I had never felt that before.  It just felt right here.”

Born in Portland, Peck’s family moved to California when he was 5, before later settling in Charlotte, where the budding artist got his start fresh out of high school, sketching caricatures at a local amusement park.  It was a talent that would take him back to the West Coast, where he had snagged a similar gig at SeaWorld in San Diego.

“I was really, really sought after,” says Peck, now 50.  “We got a commission for every sketch sold, and you could sell hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of dollars’ worth a day.  It was more than minimum wage—maybe $12 or $20 an hour, which felt like a great job for an 18-year-old in the ’90s.”

But California gold paled in comparison to the riches the enterprising young upstart discovered upon arriving in the French Quarter. 

“I saw the artists in Jackson Square, and then I saw the French Market and got this crazy idea,” he recounts.  “When people saw me drawing at SeaWorld, my line would get really long, so I knew I could compete with other artists.  But I didn’t want to fight for spaces on the Square.  So, while I was still on vacation, I bought a business license and got set up with the French Market to sell there.

“I called my roommates back in San Diego and said, ‘Is anybody interested in paying whatever bills I have at the house and putting my stuff in a box and sending it to me in exchange for my car?’  My first day in business, I had only $27 left to my name.”

Peck’s starving artist phase was short lived.  Working from a rolling cart he constructed (“It was beautiful; it looked like it belonged in Disneyland”), his caricatures proved immensely popular among Market-goers (“I’ve probably drawn close to a half-million”).  So much so that, after a few years, he expanded his French Quarter footprint—along with his artistic output— joining the nearby Dutch Alley Artist’s Co-Op as a founding member in 2003.

“I did caricatures out in front, but I also had a small wall inside where I could sell my stuff,” he notes.  “Caricatures didn’t make sense in there, so I started drawing things from around the Quarter.”

Tracing his creative timeline to the age of 3 (“my earliest memory is drawing”) and an obsession with PBS’s “The Joy of Painting” host Bob Ross (“he came on after ‘Sesame Street’’’), Peck received his first set of acrylics when he was 12.  By the end of high school, his brush techniques were on par with his drawing skills.  Pushing his easel aside while focusing his caricature career, it would take New Orleans artist Tony Green, known for his sweeping street scenes, to rekindle Peck’s passion for painting.

“I used to store my stuff for the French Market in this building on Governor Nicholls, where Tony lived on the fourth floor,” he remembers. “One day, when I was rolling my cart in, he saw my drawings and was like, ‘You’re really good. You should try and paint.’ So, I started painting. And, oh, my god—he was the harshest critic!

“He was constantly harping on my gray values and that ‘the shadows don’t look right, the colors are not realistic,’ blah, blah, blah.  He was right, of course.  I was doing something more akin to trying to dramatize the scenes related to caricature at the time as paintings.  And he was encouraging me to be more sophisticated and think deeper.”

Following Green’s lead, Peck began refining his “very loud, bold, and cartoonish” style, creating an oil-on-paper rendering of Canal Street that quickly sold for $500 and changed his artistic trajectory.  He began placing an easel outside of the Co-Op, next to his caricature setup, and painting en plein air—Dutch Alley, Tujague’s across the street, whatever was within eyesight. 

He would set up next to the late portrait artist Dan Fuller, who “took up the mantle for Tony Green” and taught Peck to focus on shadow and light and the importance of light sources.  Soon his paintings began outselling his drawings.

“But I got bored with the subject matter,” Peck says.  “So, after drawing sketches of tourists all day, I would walk around the river or the Quarter at night and take reference photos of whatever I wanted to paint.  Then I would print them out on typing paper and stick them to the easel, then paint that. 

“My first night scenes were of the river in the fog with the streetlamps showing through and of the red streetcar on Canal Street with fog crossing over and dragging light into the fog.  People loved those; the popularity of the night scenes took off like crazy.”

Step inside the Matthew Peck Gallery at 534 Royal Street (one of five French Quarter locations he’s occupied since moving on from Dutch Alley), and you’ll find the walls filled with Peck’s now-signature nightscapes.  At once dark and moody yet colorful and vibrant, his works center largely on the neighborhood’s iconic architecture.

“The structure is very realistic,” Pecks says in describing his compositions, “but the shadow, light, and color are exaggerated, sometimes outlandish.  One of the core tenets of New Orleans is, ‘Do what you wanna.’  Celebrate who you are, celebrate who we are, celebrate for any reason you can.  There’s probably a deeper philosophical meaning there, because it’s also like the second line, which is a response to death.  There’s a sort of defiance to the tragedy of life with our celebration.  That color is like that. 

“In my work there’s also the mystery and the darkness and even the ominous sometimes,” he notes.  “The fearful can be beautiful when you are in love with the mystery.”

Gone are the $500 price tags.  Today Peck’s pieces garner anywhere from $3,000 to $54,000, with collectors spread nationwide and around the globe. Now his artworks come custom-framed. And over the years, he’s broadened his frame of reference as well, painting other cities he’s visited—New York, San Francisco, Barcelona, Paris, Prague, Venice—since that long-ago vacation that landed him here.

Still, it’s the French Quarter—the 500 block of Royal, in particular—where he feels most at home, with friend/fellow artist Craig Tracy newly ensconced just down the street and Sutton Galleries, which (in addition to the since-closed Galerie Rue Toulouse) long carried his work and helped Peck grow his client base, nearby.  Add the Historic New Orleans Collection, Elliot Gallery, Galerie Rue Royale, and Maison Royale, and you’ll understand the logic behind Peck’s recent relocation from his former Chartres Street address.

“There’s an enormous amount of foot traffic on this block,” he reasons.  “And many of them are already looking for me here, because I’ve been on Royal Street since 2010 – in one or more of these galleries.”

“One of the default ways to think about other businesses is competition,” he adds.  “But my early history in selling art was in amusement parks, and when we would get a new roller coaster, it didn’t compete with the old roller coasters; it made the park better.  I don’t think of my art gallery neighbors as competition; I think of them as additional features that draw collectors to the area.” 

A longtime resident of both the French Quarter and Tremé (which he has likewise painted), Peck currently resides in Gentilly near City Park.  But it’s his near-three decades of nocturnal wanderings through the Vieux Carré that he returns to again and again for inspiration.

“I bonded with the Quarter by spending my life here,” he says.  “Even now, when I walk to my car in the evening after I’ve been at the gallery, I see the beauty of the French Quarter.”

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