Gregory Martin

Artist Statement 

"Although my paintings are most easily categorized as landscapes, I think of them as contemplative spaces in which to experience dualities and polarities within human nature, the natural world and the practice of painting. For instance; growth and decay, the illusion of depth and flatness, the “truth” of photography and the “fiction” of painting, the differences between our ideals and our actions. 

I use somewhat flat skies and backgrounds with a closely grouped color and value range not only to achieve an atmospheric depth and push/pull with the foreground elements but also with an eye towards achieving the sort of meditative space that color field painting can have. The foreground elements are handled in a more gestural way exploring the surrogate potential of plants and artifacts that at turns could suggest portraiture, narratives or gestural abstraction. 

I like to think of the scenes I depict as getting at a sort of collective unconscious as they are the spaces in between our destinations, in between nature and civilization, a view of the sordid artifacts of our backyard activities, before we’ve had a chance to pick up and present a crafted image of ourselves to our guests, revealing things about ourselves that we are not comfortable with. Quite often our actions are revealed to be at odds with our ideals. The genre of landscape painting has a history of expressing a romanticized view of our relationship to nature, beauty, and spirituality that I embrace as a counterweight to the banality and degradation present in these views of our contemporary environment. The POV is that of the transitory, comfortably detached and sometimes meditative space of the automobile. Cycles of growth and decay are evident in both nature and in the artifacts of human activity present in the scenes."

Water and Oil

Oil on canvas, 38" x 48", 2019