Martin Greenland

About

The New Ashgate Gallery are exhibiting his beautifully detailed highly realistic yet surreal paintings in the gallery as a celebration of the landscape painting not as backdrop but as centre stage. So often landscapes are presented as adornments or decoration to our interior, but Martin Greenland turns this notion on its head, each of his deeply thoughtful landscapes are fictional; fabrications taken from disjointed memories and views, sketches and writings all brought together to create a magical and mysterious other-worldly atmosphere.

Greenland’s paintings could be mistaken for being traditional, but he begs to differ. He considers his work as contemporary as that of any modern art painter and whilst traditional landscape painters and their techniques may have informed or guided his own way of working, it is his dedication to finding compositions which work for each landscape without confining his practice to a strict set of rules like that of the old masters, which sets him apart. Martin’s clever ability to grasp the audience, to draw them into the detail of his landscapes until they can find their own excitement and narrative within, firmly plants his work in the ‘here and now’. 

Greenland explains his way of working as such “sometimes a painting can be meticulously planned out in terms of drawing on the canvas but other times…. I just see where they go. Sometimes even paintings with an implied realism or illusionism have an abstract quality”

The New Ashgate Gallery would highly recommend seeing Greenland’s works in person as their beautiful mystique is not captured in the photographs seen online or in the press. In fact they suggest in the current world of photography being all encompassing, where landscapes are recorded by everyone constantly using technology Greenland’s beautiful intense paintings are an antidote to the over saturation of photographic reproduction and as an opportunity to look at his fictional world, a perfect mirage of our environments, a feast for the eyes.