My painting has always stemmed from memory and imagination. I largely work in the landscape tradition though I still don’t consider myself to be a landscape painter. I try to make my work a very delicate balance between the believable, based very much upon the seen, and the unbelievable, which is about the unseen, the imagined. I also make it a delicate balance between appreciating the physical beauty, the technical craft of paint and the concept; subjugating the paint to make it do the job of creating the illusion to carry the meaning behind the imagery.

Painting is like a walk; it is an exploration, but if I’m ‘inspired’ by a landscape, I don’t paint the places or landscapes I encounter, I paint about them. They are the catalysts for my invention because invention gives me the true power of being an artist, like a composer. I need to be able to make changes and yet keep the paintings convincingly rooted enough in our ‘real’ world. On a walk I’m in the real world but I’m also wonderfully lost in my own world which is my own interpretation of it. Here I’m taking it all in; in the studio I’m letting it all out, then embellishing it, adding to it, discarding parts, dissecting it, scattering its parts and allowing them to mingle with imagery from my memory or imagination. Painting thus becomes a realization, in both the understanding and the making real sense of the word.

A lot of what I set out to do starts as insistent images which enter my head. I live my life often as though I’m experiencing a waking dream, with recurring images, often very clear but fiendishly difficult to put down, flying at me, quite often unexpectedly. Many of these images evolve slowly, giving me different possibilities, and they are all somehow based upon something within my experience. I get cross pollination of ideas. I will see something and it will hint at me of something else, something seemingly unconnected. Thus a potential painting is born where I try to amalgamate both or even several visual and conceptual ideas in a work which ultimately must work as a whole and must not diminish the power of any element within it.

However, no matter how much I plan, my paintings, what you see, are the result of evolution on the canvas, and increasingly I just start with an empty canvas and see where the paint, the broad and indefinite beginnings, take me.

Martin Greenland

December 2007