Shifting gears from doing artwork for the sexually explicit Further Adventures of Flesh Gordon, to painting mattes for such squeaky-clean Disney films as The Return of the Apple Dumpling Gang seems like an enormous change of pace and perspective. But for artist/illustrator David Mattingly, the shift was taken in one quick stride.
Fresh out of art school, Mattingly took on the task of doing production artwork on the Flesh Gordon sequel (which has never been filmed). Harrison Elienshaw happened to see his work and suggested that he come around to the Disney Studios. Mattingly did and landed a job at Disney in one of the most exclusive professions in the industry — painting mattes for feature films.
According to Mattingly, there are only seven working matte artists in all of Hollywood. To make matters more difficult, they belong to a union so exclusive that many an artist, after waiting years, even decades, finally gives up in despair. But Mattingly, only in his mid-twenties, already has a number of films to his credit, including the Disney space epic The Black Hole and a film about an alien house pet, The Cat from Outer Space. More recently, he completed work as chief matte artist on The Watcher in the Woods, a Disney juvenile-Gothic with SF overtones. And lined up for the near future are art assignments on Disney's The Condorman and The Devil and Max Devlin.
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