Martin Greenland’s New Fiction

Cornerstone Gallery, Shaw Street
18th September – 12th November 2010

By Gayna Rose Madder 18/9/2010

Martin Greenland, winner of John Moores Prize 2006 with Before Vermeer's Clouds, has an exhibition, New Fiction starting next week at the Cornerstone Gallery. Gayna Rose Madder asked him how this came about.

"I don’t know how I fit within the Liverpool Biennial. I am with the Independents and so I consider myself to be an outsider. I live and work in relative isolation and cannot regard myself as an urbanite at all: unlike most artists I have never lived or worked in a city of any size. I was the only artist to win the John Moores who has never lived, worked or trained in London. This isolation makes my work quite different. I feel comfortable in a rural environment, from which derives most of my inspiration; the depth and meaning and solace informs my painting.

"Earlier this year, I was asked by Jason Jones at Cornerstone Gallery to do this show. Previously I have had four solo exhibitions in Liverpool and have been represented at the John Moores Exhibition of Contemporary Painting five times, which I won in 2006. The work in the show comes from the past four years, including pieces only just completed as the show begins. New Fiction has a literary reference which I like.

"Increasingly my paintings have become improvisations, with scant or no reference either to drawings I produce or ideas for compositions, to nail down spontaneous thoughts or images. This is because I need to invent, make changes, and not be tied down by actualities. But I want the viewer to be convinced by what I do whilst knowing it is fictional, but I have to come out and say ‘I am a landscape painter’, with pride.

"This is one of the many aspects where painting and photography differ. One does not look as Monet’s summer afternoon meadows and see a snapshot, but an accumulation of slowly moving hours, even days.

"I am inspired by everything. The roots of some pieces in this show lie in childhood memories; some are a late response to an area of Northern England which held my emotions as a young teenager in the 1970s and enables me, through my art, to be honest about my emotions. So much of contemporary life has become dry, knowing and post-modern; art has dived headlong into a sort of international soup, full of self-reference and cynicism, almost empty of humanism. If my approach is old-fashioned I don’t care.

"I have sometimes thought of using Liverpool as a starting point in my painting. As I write this may not be far off. I find a great kinship in the city; so many people I have met have become good friends."

Martin Greenland is also exhibiting in South Korea in a joint show involving past prize winners of the John Moores Prize. At the end of November he exhibits at Art Space Gallery / Michael Richardson Contemporary Art in Islington, London.

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