The start of the month saw us travel to the Belgian coastal town of Ostend for the annual Crystal Ship contemporary and street art festival. Now in its third year, the festival curator Bjørn Van Poucke continues to impress with his invited selection of both international and national artists who paint and install works right across the city.

One of this years invited national artist currently based in Antwerp was Matthew Dawn. We were first introduced to Matthew back in 2016 at the inaugural edition of the Crystal Ship festival when he was working with the festival providing assistance for the artists. We later discovered some of his own mural work while traveling In Belgium last year and we were delighted to see him as part of this year's festival line up of 15 invited artists.

Dawn previously studied Digital Arts and Entertainment, Business Management as well as Animation while he was in college. Later he dropped out of the latter two setting up his own business designing and selling T-shirts under the name ‘DAWN clothing’.

He also began painting graffiti and running graffiti workshops which led to him producing commercial works for companies the likes of NIKE ELC, Citroën, Xior, and several major event organizers.

Alongside these projects, he developed the ‘TINYPINK’ - a stencil cap tool that would help spraypaint artists to achieve super thin and crip lines while capturing the excess spraypaint in an attached reservoir. The first batch has already sold out but checks out the Tiny Pink website for updates on the project.













Artist and Digital Content Creator at The Crystal Ship, Jolien De Waele interviews Matthew about his completed mural for her One Minute Interview video series.



Matthew Dawn For the Crystal Ship 
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For his Ostend mural, Dawn has painted the third in a series of murals he is currently working on called ‘Paper Crown Series’, the second of which was painted in Antwerp earlier this year.

We asked Matthew about the new mural and if there was any connection to Ostend, here is what he told us; “The crown represents ego or success and the paper shows how trivial it is. It is in front of my eyes blinding me is evident. There is no link to Ostend but the school liked it because there is a wooden chair in the image and I look like a troublesome teenager/ student!'