The Distance Between

About

Signal Gallery presents three painters who are not purely interested in showing us a ravishing landscape or a gritty cityscape; the world in their hands is a stranger and more melancholy place. Martin Greenland paints scenes that are superficially glossy and idealized, calling upon a wide range of landscape styles from the great early Dutch landscape painters to the British Romantic masters including Constable. He speaks their language but what he is saying is very different — personal and contemporary. It is as if he is distancing himself from the scenes he paints so masterfully, observing them with a modern eye. Martin is a former winner of the highly prestigious John Moores Prize (2006), his winning work (Before Vermeer's Clouds) being surely one of the greatest landscape paintings of the last few decades. Martin has exhibited widely in his native Cumbria and northwest England, as well as in London; where he recently had a successful solo show in Spitalfields. Rosalind Davis creates images that imply a wide range of associations and emotions. The plain and familiar structures she depicts represent environments that seem hostile, threatening or nostalgic in some way. However the medium she uses, mixing painting with textile appliqué and embroidery, is oddly decorative. The effect she achieves is disconcertingly touching and powerful. Rosalind studied at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art and has exhibited widely in London, including a solo show at The Residence Gallery. Marie-Claire Hamon has spent many years soaking up the intense Atlantic light of West Cornwall. Many of her works seem to be bleached by it and blasted by the persistent winds that accompany it. The impressionistic images she makes show us a country that is either empty of anything but a flat horizon or littered with old cars and caravans. It seems a million miles from the picturesque bustle of the coastal villages and beaches that represent Cornwall to most of us. This is a landscape of loneliness and memories — of distantly remembered journeys and lost loves. Marie-Claire studied at Falmouth College of Art and has exhibited extensively in solo/group shows in Cornwall, as well as in London. These are three artists then who present their melancholy themes in a way that is alluring, sometimes playful and always exquisitely executed.