There have been two constants in Matthew Crane’s life: trauma and art.
Stepping into his new Clinton Street studio, the latter is obvious. Camera equipment straight ahead. Guitar amps in a side room to the left. Original artwork and framed reprints lining the walls around the corner to the right.
But as the 39-year-old smoothly rocks back and forth in a wood chair, the trauma isn’t so apparent. Not until he starts painting just an outline of what he’s been through.
The lifeless body he found along the Erie Basin Marina as a 9-year-old Hamburg kid. Near-death experiences in the Iraq War (he was sworn into the Navy on Sept. 9, 2001). Reintegrating with society and his struggle with depression, which took the lives of his brother and several friends.
“My art kind of was bred through trauma and working my way through trauma—over and over again in my life just getting hit with it,” Matthew says. “I’m lucky that I have an outlet. I can make music, I can make art. I use it as a modality for healing.”
The journey from self-medicating teenager to alcoholic veteran to sober family man has all led to the creation of Matthew Crane Studios. Local galleries have sold his work in the past, but this is a place all his own that serves as a daily reminder of the three pillars in his life: family, art and suicide prevention.
Family became priority No. 1 in 2012, when he gave up drugs and alcohol to become a father figure to his first of two sons.
“Honestly,” Matthew says, “I took one thing away and everything opened up in my life.”
That commitment also extended to his military family, who helped him rediscover a sense of purpose through AmeriCorps, The Odyssey Project and the 7x Human Performance Project—a group of special operations veterans and endurance athletes who are traveling the globe for suicide research.
And he made a commitment to the creative gifts that he cursed for the longest time.
“Why couldn’t I have innate physics or mathematics ability and go make a million dollars a year somewhere?” Matthew says. “But I’ve matured into realizing that this is a super valuable skill. But also, I want to encourage my kids. I can’t tell them they can follow their dreams if I’m not.”
The periods in Matthew’s life when he wasn’t focusing on art were some of his lowest. But reengaging with artwork after the help of therapy has given him a greater respect for its importance and its power.
“It’s the source of my growth, it’s the source of my transformation. I want to share with people that it can be comfort if you’re lonely,” Matthew says. “Connecting to people with common causes—veterans and my family—I feel useful in those places.
“I feel useful in the veteran community, I feel useful in my family and I feel useful in the studio.”
