Since leaving The Royal Academy Schools in 1987 Martin has painted and exhibited extensively. He has had exhibitions in France, USA, Australia, Holland and Belgium, as well exhibiting at numerous galleries, art fairs and other venues in the UK. He has silk-screen prints in the collections of The Victoria and Albert Museum and The House of Commons. His work is often selected for The Royal Academy Summer Show. He has twice been chosen to show work at the prestigious John Moore’s Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, the second time as a Prize-winner.
The record paintings are very much an ongoing series. I love music and it is always playing in the background when I’m working, it’s a great companion and always inspiring. As a teenager I collected vast quantities of singles and LP’s. As a fan I would often spend long periods of time copying my favourite covers and turning some of them into murals. Fast forward fifteen to twenty years and some of my favourite singers started to crop up in landscape paintings and so it was no great leap for me to actually start painting actual records, turning them into still lives. Growing up and living through what was probably the golden age of the vinyl single these elegiac paintings have become laments, and celebrations of a bygone era.
Originally I painted the 7” singles as life size and they had a tromp l’oeil effect but enlarging them allowed for a much bigger impact and turned these flat still lives into something much more monumental. I’ve always considered myself a realist or narrative painter and these paintings do seem to veer towards Pop Art territory. The records are just objects, mass produced, commercial, machine made but the painstaking attention to detail, the wear and tear of the record sleeves gives them a narrative, they‘re an intimate and seminal link to someone’s life. Some of the graphics are quite beautiful and have now become iconic and I’ve tried to make the paintings resonate or radiate with signs of life. These records have been played to death, lovingly labelled, given, received, owned and eventually abandoned. The paintings liberate them from dusty collections or thrift shop obscurity.
|
