MARTIN GREENLAND'S SELECTED FICTIONS
by Andrew Lambirth
 Martin Greenland paints compound images involving the English countryside, arrangements of memory that have more to do with imaginative reinvention than with straightforward recording. ‘I’m not interested in sticking to the topographics of things‘, he insists. ‘My paintings are all about my experiences with places. But then I’ll get an idea about a place I’ve never been to before in my life.’ A substantial part of his painting practice is maintaining the capacity for surprise: at what he sees in the landscape and what his brain will throw back at him in response. The ideas that accumulate around the subjects that fascinate him have been the impulse behind his latest group of paintings, perhaps the most assured and inventive of his career.
When he’s not in the studio, Greenland takes long walks, wandering over his favourite countryside, observing it in all moods and seasons, by moonlight as much as by day. Although he doesn’t want to be seen as a landscape painter, preferring to be thought of simply as a painter, he marinates in a sense of place, or rather a series of individual places that particularly appeal to him. He sometimes draws during these excursions (he doesn’t take photographs), but mostly he looks. In terms of information-gathering, Greenland makes drawings to find out about things, how they piece together, and how their appearance may be rendered. But he doesn’t use these drawings as source material for the paintings - that would be too direct a procedure. He needs to transmute his observation in front of nature through the burning glass of memory and imagination.
The impetus behind Greenland’s paintings is much more of a modernist endeavour than the traditional approach to the depiction of pleasing countryside. He composes, he invents. Greenland’s roots are in many art forms, from Symbolism to Surrealism via Realism and Romanticism. He paints ideas and feelings about the context in which we find ourselves and live out our lives. His work seems always to be concerned with the penetration of light into darkness; or to reverse the proposition, with the determined emergence of light from an all-encompassing gloom. Although he ostensibly paints dark pictures, he is a dab hand at the braiding of vegetation with light, or at spilling light subtly down the most chasmal landscape.
 Water is also an important source of light, in the way it moves through landscape - in pursuit of the easiest route to the sea - dropping down and worrying at the rock, flickering and glinting, throwing back light from its ever-moving surface. See the wild whirling of To the River Duddon, one of the darkest paintings here, inspired by a Norman Nicholson poem. Ironically, Greenland’s painting began in full spring sunshine and was originally very bright and colourful to look at. But the artist had something else in mind. ‘I saw what it could have been’, he says, and began to repaint his canvas with a darker vision altogether. As he freely admits, he made up the whole form of the landscape, but it is nevertheless true to the feel of the river, splitting, tumbling and levelling out down the valley. Don’t overlook the mysterious point of light, far back on the left amid the trees, like a candle-flame placed in a window to guide the wanderer home. This is a poignant and poetic motif which reappears in Greenland’s paintings, seen here in lively contrast to the cascades of water like smoke tracing out the space of the painting.
 Or a more craggy terrain, sexy with water moving through it, the strangely titled Primitive Landscape. Here is a landscape that goes back a lot further in time than the recent industrial past, that could belong to the dawning of the world. And yet Greenland is also ambivalent about depicting something so unequivocally ancient, and has painted in a jet plane to bring a taste of the modern into view. At least, there’s a paint mark in the top left third of the picture which could be a jet plane, though I’m not convinced that anyone would read it as such unless tipped off by the artist to do so.
Yet it’s undoubtedly true that this Victorian quarry has a prehistoric quality to it, besides being oddly reminiscent of a favourite Cézanne subject - the rocky outcrop surrounded by pines. A real mixture of signals emanates from this painting: there’s a strong Nordic element, but this is balanced by a pastoral Italianate feel to the subject. (Note the dramatic framing of this classical composition.) Yet it remains firmly rooted in the locality Greenland knows and loves so well, the North-West of England. On the left is a pine, on the right pine and oak with larch breaking in. This is not a portrait of a place, but an imaginative reinterpretation, its characteristics chanelled through the formal dynamics of picture-making.
 In National Park, consider the skill in the mixing of colour in the depiction of the hills and outcrops, with the pale green of sunlit grass masking the warmer, redder tints of earth beneath. Notice the precise way in which the folds and declivities of the land are taking the light or dropping back into shadow. This wonderfully subtle drama is counterpointed by a communications mast and attendant hut on the left of the landscape, and an edge of a reservoir. Not for Greenland the editing out of the unpicturesque. He doesn’t feel the need to record urban sprawl but does like to interject traces of man’s presence in the landscape: buildings, roadways, evidence of technological advance. In fact he has a penchant for what he calls ‘sub-industrial landscape turning back to nature’.
 In another curiously-titled painting, From the Voyage of the Somnambulist, the viewer’s eye is carefully guided by the artist: we look as it were through the gap in the foreground stone wall, down the suggested path and through the main space of the painting to the tall house with the red awning in the background. In addition there are three other focal points: pinpricks of light to catch the roving eye, lamps in the dark wood. If this seems to suggest something out of Narnia, there is no corresponding hint of whimsy here. Rather, there is an underlying spiritual optimism to the work: nothing so overt as a stated faith, but a reassuring glow of possibility amid the deep Prussian blues and greens sifted with shadow.
 Compare the wintry mystery of Ghosts. The alert viewer, on first looking at the livery of the trees mightdeduce the season to be autumn from the warm coppery tints of the leaves. But on this kind of detail, Greenland is strong. The beech keeps its leaves until late in the season, into December. This strange haunted landscape derives from a memory of an old airfield on top of a plateau in another part of the country. Again, there is a lamp standard like a sentinel, which although it signals life, here also seems to suggest mortality. (The light can so easily be snuffed out.) Perhaps the memories of the place, the wartime flying missions so often ending in violent death, have soaked the land with melancholy.
Greenland begins work often by writing rather than drawing, in order to fix an idea in his head. Then he may make small sketches in a notebook. He finds it incredibly difficult to capture his visions: ‘It’s almost like trying to remember a dream’, he says. We all know how fugitive a dream can be, and the impossibility of rendering it accurately in cold prose. So Greenland writes, and develops the idea through words, perhaps in different directions from that first visual seed.
When he is ready to begin a painting, he draws in charcoal straight onto the white canvas. Onto this he applies a white underpainting, and over that is washed a warm ground, usually of burnt sienna thinned with turps. Then there’s a lot of wiping out and adjustment. He loves the way the image develops so suddenly from a thin line drawing to a full tonal study. At this stage, when he has achieved often a rather effective monochrome painting with a life of its own, the temptation to leave it like this is strong. But the realization that there’s so much else he can do to develop the picture wins the day, and he continues with the process of putting paint on and taking it off, revising and strengthening the image.
The finished painting rarely tallies exactly with the mental image he has had of the painting right from the start. He constantly sees new potential in a picture, and is excited by the unexpected. And he lets the movement of the paint itself help to determine the genesis of the image. He works on six or more paintings at once, not attempting to finish one before starting another, but allowing them to develop concurrently. He finds that they feed into each other, and sometimes he can have as many as 20 on the go at once. ‘The seasons in my work are very important’, he observes. Greenland always paints the season he is actually in, so if a painting of spring is not finished before summer ups the pace, it must be left for another year.
If there’s a touch of Courbet about Greenland’s cliffs, it’s because Courbet, along with Corot and the painters of the Barbizon School, is an abiding presence in his work. He is also interested in the Russian landscape painters such as Isaak Levitan (1860-1900) and the Scandanavian school as well as the American painters of the sublime such as Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt. To come closer to home and more up-to-date, Michael Andrews (1928-95) was an important early influence. Greenland remembers being extremely impressed by the Hayward Gallery exhibition of Andrews’ work in 1980-1. For him, Andrews made shrewd use of symbol and state of mind.
 There is a sense of calm in Greenland’s paintings which counters the equal and often pervading sense of unrest. It’s no surprise to learn that in the past he often employed surrealism. He is still attracted by the power of unexpected juxtapositions, and has a lasting affection for Ernstian forests and Magrittian abuttals. He is also interested in the surface of his paintings, the facture, and how to embed meaning and significance in it. Although he doesn’t employ dramatic impasto, he varies his textures as decisively as his colours, and the evocative power of his brushstrokes is combined with judicious palette-knifings. Look, for instance, at Red Quarry, and the pleasing sculptural resonance of the spread of paint on the red walls of the quarry. Elsewhere, a particularly attractive feature is the veining of charcoal appearing through the paint, the underdrawing directly influencing the look of the finished work.
There are no people in this new group of paintings, not even the mythical creatures (such as centaur or minotaur) that have featured in other recent work. Greenland is tired of our self-obsession and wants to paint something larger than the merely human. Yet he is happy to paint the vestiges of mankind’s presence, the footmarks in the sand. The appeal of ruins is more potent than cheap music. ‘I like abandoned landscapes’, he says. Martin Greenland is a visionary painter dealing in pictorial ideas which find their best expression at the moment through intriguing interpretations of the English countryside.
Andrew Lambirth |
MARTIN GREENLAND : Arrangements of Memory Exhibition at Art Space Gallery : 11 Sep - 10 Oct 2009