Martin Greenland’s Selected Fictions

Martin Greenland paints compound images involving the English countryside,
arrangements of memory that have more to do with imaginative reinvention than
with straightforward recording. ‘I’m not interested in sticking to the topographics
of things‘, he insists. ‘My paintings are all about my experiences with places. But
then I’ll get an idea about a place I’ve never been to before in my life.’ A
substantial part of his painting practice is maintaining the capacity for surprise: at
what he sees in the landscape and what his brain will throw back at him in
response. The ideas that accumulate around the subjects that fascinate him have
been the impulse behind his latest group of paintings, perhaps the most assured
and inventive of his career.
When he’s not in the studio, Greenland takes long walks, wandering over his
favourite countryside, observing it in all moods and seasons, by moonlight as
much as by day. Although he doesn’t want to be seen as a landscape painter,
preferring to be thought of simply as a painter, he marinates in a sense of place,
or rather a series of individual places that particularly appeal to him. He
sometimes draws during these excursions (he doesn’t take photographs), but
mostly he looks. In terms of information-gathering, Greenland makes drawings
to find out about things, how they piece together, and how their appearance
may be rendered. But he doesn’t use these drawings as source material for the
paintings - that would be too direct a procedure. He needs to transmute his
observation in front of nature through the burning glass of memory and
imagination.
The impetus behind Greenland’s paintings is much more of a modernist
endeavour than the traditional approach to the depiction of pleasing
countryside. He composes, he invents. Greenland’s roots are in many art forms,
from Symbolism to Surrealism via Realism and Romanticism. He paints ideas
and feelings about the context in which we find ourselves and live out our lives.
His work seems always to be concerned with the penetration of light into
darkness; or to reverse the proposition, with the determined emergence of light
from an all-encompassing gloom. Although he ostensibly paints dark pictures,
he is a dab hand at the braiding of vegetation with light, or at spilling light subtly
down the most chasmal landscape.
Water is also an important source of light, in the way it moves through
landscape - in pursuit of the easiest route to the sea - dropping down and
worrying at the rock, flickering and glinting, throwing back light from its ever-
moving surface. See the wild whirling of To the River Duddon (ill. inside front
cover), one of the darkest paintings here, inspired by a Norman Nicholson
poem. Ironically, Greenland’s painting began in full spring sunshine and was
originally very bright and colourful to look at. But the artist had something else
in mind. ‘I saw what it could have been’, he says, and began to repaint his
canvas with a darker vision altogether. As he freely admits, he made up the

whole form of the landscape, but it is nevertheless true to the feel of the river,
splitting, tumbling and levelling out down the valley. Don’t overlook the
mysterious point of light, far back on the left amid the trees, like a candle-flame
placed in a window to guide the wanderer home. This is a poignant and poetic
motif which reappears in Greenland’s paintings, seen here in lively contrast to
the cascades of water like smoke tracing out the space of the painting.
Or a more craggy terrain, sexy with water moving through it, the strangely titled
Primitive Landscape (ill.pp.4/5). Here is a landscape that goes back a lot further
in time than the recent industrial past, that could belong to the dawning of the
world. And yet Greenland is also ambivalent about depicting something so
unequivocally ancient, and has painted in a jet plane to bring a taste of the
modern into view. At least, there’s a paint mark in the top left third of the picture
which could be a jet plane, though I’m not convinced that anyone would read it
as such unless tipped off by the artist to do so.
Yet it’s undoubtedly true that this Victorian quarry has a prehistoric quality to it,
besides being oddly reminiscent of a favourite Cézanne subject - the rocky
outcrop surrounded by pines. A real mixture of signals emanates from this
painting: there’s a strong Nordic element, but this is balanced by a pastoral
Italianate feel to the subject. (Note the dramatic framing of this classical
composition.) Yet it remains firmly rooted in the locality Greenland knows and
loves so well, the North-West of England. On the left is a pine, on the right pine
and oak with larch breaking in. This is not a portrait of a place, but an
imaginative reinterpretation, its characteristics chanelled through the formal
dynamics of picture-making.
In National Park, consider the skill in the mixing of colour in the depiction of the
hills and outcrops, with the pale green of sunlit grass masking the warmer, redder
tints of earth beneath. Notice the precise way in which the folds and declivities of
the land are taking the light or dropping back into shadow. This wonderfully subtle
drama is counterpointed by a communications mast and attendant hut on the left
of the landscape, and an edge of a reservoir. Not for Greenland the editing out of
the unpicturesque. He doesn’t feel the need to record urban sprawl but does like
to interject traces of man’s presence in the landscape: buildings, roadways,
evidence of technological advance. In fact he has a penchant for what he calls
‘sub-industrial landscape turning back to nature’.
In another curiously-titled painting, From the Voyage of the Somnambulist (ill.
inside back cover), the viewer’s eye is carefully guided by the artist: we look as

were through the gap in the foreground stone wall, down the suggested path
and through the main space of the painting to the tall house with the red awning
in the background. In addition there are three other focal points: pinpricks of
light to catch the roving eye, lamps in the dark wood. If this seems to suggest
something out of Narnia, there is no corresponding hint of whimsy here. Rather,
there is an underlying spiritual optimism to the work: nothing so overt as a
stated faith, but a reassuring glow of possibility amid the deep Prussian blues
and greens sifted with shadow.
Compare the wintry mystery of Ghosts. The alert viewer, on first looking at the
livery of the trees might deduce the season to be autumn from the warm
coppery tints of the leaves. But on this kind of detail, Greenland is strong. The
beech keeps its leaves until late in the season, into December. This strange
haunted landscape derives from a memory of an old airfield on top of a plateau
in another part of the country. Again, there is a lamp standard like a sentinel,
which although it signals life, here also seems to suggest mortality. (The light
can so easily be snuffed out.) Perhaps the memories of the place, the wartime
flying missions so often ending in violent death, have soaked the land with
melancholy.
Greenland begins work often by writing rather than drawing, in order to fix an
idea in his head. Then he may make small sketches in a notebook. He finds it
incredibly difficult to capture his visions: ‘It’s almost like trying to remember a
dream’, he says. We all know how fugitive a dream can be, and the impossibility
of rendering it accurately in cold prose. So Greenland writes, and develops the
idea through words, perhaps in different directions from that first visual seed.
When he is ready to begin a painting, he draws in charcoal straight onto the white
canvas. Onto this he applies a white underpainting, and over that is washed a
warm ground, usually of burnt sienna thinned with turps. Then there’s a lot of
wiping out and adjustment. He loves the way the image develops so suddenly
from a thin line drawing to a full tonal study. At this stage, when he has achieved
often a rather effective monochrome painting with a life of its own, the temptation
to leave it like this is strong. But the realization that there’s so much else he can
do to develop the picture wins the day, and he continues with the process of
putting paint on and taking it off, revising and strengthening the image.
The finished painting rarely tallies exactly with the mental image he has had of the
painting right from the start. He constantly sees new potential in a picture, and is
excited by the unexpected. And he lets the movement of the paint itself help to
determine the genesis of the image. He works on six or more paintings at once,
not attempting to finish one before starting another, but allowing them to develop
concurrently. He finds that they feed into each other, and sometimes he can have
as many as 20 on the go at once. ‘The seasons in my work are very important’,
he observes. Greenland always paints the season he is actually in, so if a painting of
spring is not finished before summer ups the pace, it must be left for another year.


If there’s a touch of Courbet about Greenland’s cliffs, it’s because
Courbet, along with Corot and the painters of the Barbizon School,
is an abiding presence in his work. He is also interested in the
Russian landscape painters such as Isaak Levitan (1860 -1900) and
the Scandanavian school as well as the American painters of the
sublime such as Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt. To come
closer to home and more up-to-date, Michael Andrews (1928-95)
was an important early influence. Greenland remembers being
extremely impressed by the Hayward Gallery exhibition of Andrews’
work in 1980-1. For him, Andrews made shrewd use of symbol
and state of mind.
There is a sense of calm in Greenland’s paintings which counters
the equal and often pervading sense of unrest. It’s no surprise to
learn that in the past he often employed surrealism. He is still
attracted by the power of unexpected juxtapositions, and has a
lasting affection for Ernstian forests and Magrittian abuttals. He is
also interested in the surface of his paintings, the facture, and how
to embed meaning and significance in it. Although he doesn’t
employ dramatic impasto, he varies his textures as decisively as his
colours, and the evocative power of his brushstrokes is combined
with judicious palette-knifings. Look, for instance, at Red Quarry,
and the pleasing sculptural resonance of the spread of paint on the
red walls of the quarry. Elsewhere, a particularly attractive feature is
the veining of charcoal appearing through the paint, the
underdrawing directly influencing the look of the finished work.
There are no people in this new group of paintings, not even the
mythical creatures (such as centaur or minotaur) that have featured
in other recent work. Greenland is tired of our self-obsession and
wants to paint something larger than the merely human. Yet he is
happy to paint the vestiges of mankind’s presence, the footmarks
in the sand. The appeal of ruins is more potent than cheap music. ‘I
like abandoned landscapes’, he says. Martin Greenland is a
visionary painter dealing in pictorial ideas which find their best
expression at the moment through intriguing interpretations of the
English countryside.
Andrew Lambirth
June 2009