martin williamson

My News:

This May (16th to 18th), I am showing at the Art Fair at the Landsmark Art Centre in Teddington.

I sold a painting in Bermuda

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​My Early Years:

In 1986, after my Foundation Year, I started to paint in oils. Although I did my O-level and my A-level in Art, I was not decided as to the career path I wanted to follow. As I was very idealistic and did not want to pursue graphics of Illustration, I decided to start painting. At the time, painting for me was all guess work, how I should use the oil paints, how I should the mediums and how I should apply the colours. My initial works were full of brightness and bold colours. What attracted me was the difficulty in using the oils and the thickness and purity of the colours. I just could not get that strength in the colours with acrylics, as I did with oils paints.

I started going to Exhibitions all over London, it was my learning ground. I would go to the Royal Academy, Festival Hall (Hayward too), National Gallery, Bond Street and East End Galleries. 

As a Catholic the subject of life after death interested me, so I really did get caught up in the subject of life, death and the after life. That is why William Blake, Gustav Mureau, Odilon Redon,  Pablo Piccaso captured my interest and I pursued the spiritual and macabre. One exhibition that I saw that really caught my attention was the German Expressionism, it was a series of paintings that were done after WW1 by soldiers that were in the frontline trenches, it was very ‘gory’ and macabre.

In my work, I did still life’s that where centred around skulls, as they really attracted and enticed me, I sketched with pencil and drew on what I believed to be my unconsciousness, this was depicted in the series of the Lost Souls, Lost Landscape, and the Song for Adam & Eve .

I went on to do a degree: Art & Design with Computer and Communication Studies. Afterwards, my painting took on a different aspect. I would go for walks and I found that what Inspired me was how trees intersected with each other and the sky, I started to emulate this pattern in my paintings and I termed it ‘fragmentalism’, as earthing was being fragmented and amalgamated in to one. Due to my faith and belief, I incorporated birds in all my paintings as a symbol of the Holy Spirit watching and taking account of our lives.

 

Studying of the Great Artists:

I took time reading up on and visiting exhibitions of Blake, Redon, Moreau, Pissarro, Cezanne, Picasso, Mondrian, Rothko, Matisse, Kandinsky. Looking at the different Abstract Movements, from Cubism to Dadism, noticing their journey through the use of collage, patterns of colour, how nature influenced form and the play of different materials in their struggle to dissociate from reality. The play of these mediums and the thought process can be seen in the work of Braque, Picasso, Tatlin, Prevsner, Gabo, Arp, etc.

 

In my own journey of self discovery. I sort out other exploits that took me away from the God that I knew as my creator, the Catholic God supposedly the GOD of Abraham, Issac and Jacob. I journeyed in to an unknown chasm of unreality to understand the spiritual dynamism of reality in connection to the existence of that same reality. Could one represent this unknown or even portray the amazing expanse that GOD had created. The answer was an emphatic No. As the reality was that on the outside there was only the pigmentation of our reality that was dependant on what came from within ourselves. As I searched the inner expanses of my existence, I came to the realisation that there was just an arrogance that left me helpless and suicidal. As we see with Mark Rothko, who like Pollock was interested in surreal and primitive imagery but we see through his work, his eternal insecurity, that was reflected in the abstract tonality, resulting in him committing suicide in 1972. Then concerning Hilma Klint, the Swedish artist who immersed herself in the mysticism of the occult, creating an abstract form in an aesthetic creation, lost concept of the reality of life and sexuality.

 

In my own journey, I began to ’Fragmentalise’ my work. As I explained earlier was a  process of intersecting and intwining objects that caused a suppression of form and a newness of relationship between the object and colour.  This enabled me to capture the essence of light and amalgamate it with the colour that represented the elements of what I perceived, not necessarily of what I saw.

 

Today, I am not interested in capturing the abstract figment of reality and representing it in some form to conceptualise and term it spiritual astuteness. Today, I am more interested in how light is fragmented and pierced by our atmosphere, then how it hits an object and it creates the forms that it does as it is projected on that object.  This is exactly what Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne and  Renoir where more concerned about in their paintings. Using the effect of the brush stroke to conceptualise their expression of those objects.