Walker Picture of the Month - October 2006
Liverpool Walker Art Gallery - Artwork of the Month - October, 2006
'Before Vermeer's Clouds', by Martin Greenland
About the artwork
Martin Greenland has shown work in four consecutive John Moores Exhibitions: 16, 17, 18 and 19, between 1989 and 1995. This, his fifth showing, is the first to have been awarded a prize.
Despite their photographic realism, meticulous detail and sophisticated finish, Greenland's landscapes are all fictions. He draws a distinction between real landscape, experienced on a country walk, for example, and the 'illusion of landscape' invented with paint on canvas. The former, he declares, is 'about absorption, meditation, analysis', the latter 'about realisation, connection, revelation.' Of course all painted landscapes are illusions in the sense that they are two-dimensional fabrications of a real scene. Greenland, however, dispenses with the starting point of a real scene and fabricates a place which 'exists only in this painted illusion.'
Gallery Talk
Free gallery talks on Tuesday 3 and Thursday 19 October 2006, 1 - 1.30pm.
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Comments
Beautiful landscape. Hunter Cashdollar
Posted by: Hunter Cashdollar | October 2, 2006 05:08 PM
It's very interesting that he does not paint actual landscapes. But I can understand his reasoning. Hunter Cashdollar
Posted by: Hunter Cashdollar | October 2, 2006 05:09 PM