Matthew McHugh was born in Fort Collins, Colorado. He earned a BFA in drawing from Colorado State University in 2016. He went on to earn an MFA in drawing, painting, and printmaking from Purdue University in 2021. Matthew currently lives in Colorado and is living out his passion for teaching as a college art instructor.

Spatial metaphors help us communicate and understand our experiences in the world. Through drawing, printmaking, painting, and animation, I create illusionistic spaces that often serve as analogies for the space of my consciousness. These representational works allow the viewer to enter into an immersive setting. Each space exists in the grey zones between the binaries of real/imagined, internal/external, or man-made/natural. In this way, my art reflects on how I experience my existence as a self. We often use dichotomies to categorize experiences, such as inside/outside, self/other, mental/physical, or healthy/sick, but this can come at the expense of leaving out the nuances. I believe it is in the often-overlooked liminal spaces, or thresholds, that most of life actually happens.