How I Paint

HOW I PAINT

Martin Greenland

The former John Moores Painting Prize winner tells STEVE PILL how he creates his imagined landscapes with the help of a limited palette and a close look at Velázquez

ABOVE Retreat (Maulds Meaburn as a State of Mind), oil on canvas, 61x91cm M artin was born in Marsden, Yorkshire in 1962. He studied at Lancashire’s Nelson & Colne College before taking a BA in Fine Art (Painting) at Exeter College of Art.

Martin moved to Cumbria in the Lake District in 1985 where he has lived and worked ever since. In 2006, his painting Before Vermeer’s Clouds won the prestigious biennial John Moores Painting Prize, following in the footsteps of previous winners such as Euan Uglow and David Hockney. His next solo exhibition runs from 15 September to 1 October at Portland Gallery, London. www.martingreenland.co.uk and Witherslack isn’t a bay, but a little village, so I brought this Mediterranean sea around what is effectively our local landscape to see what it would look like.

You studied photography for a while at art school. What part does photographic reference – and the camera in general – play in your work nowadays? I’m very aware of the power of photography. I studied it on my foundation course and [my degree], so I was very aware of what an impact it had on composition.

I’ve always tried to avoid photography [in my work] because I wanted to believe that I could actually produce the paintings without the need for it. Lately I have been referring to photographs a little bit, just because I need some specific topographical details, but most of the time I just use drawings if there is a part of the landscape I need to use in the painting. Whitbarrow… was done from drawings and then just using my imagination to see what those places would look like in certain conditions.

Do you need a scientific brain as well as an artistic one to work like that? Yes, I think so. The value of understanding the science is really important. Skies, for instance, can be painted successfully by copying a photograph, but if you’re inventing a sky, you need to know how the atmosphere works – different clouds behave in different ways, depending on what time of day or year it is.

What part does drawing play in the composition of your paintings? Most of the time now I work straight on the canvas. I don’t produce working sketches or even studies in paint or anything like that because, inevitably, the composition always changes. It would only be a guide anyway. With some of my paintings, I have a fairly strong idea of how I want it to go. Sometimes I have

You live in the Lake District with great landscapes on your doorstep, yet the subjects of your paintings are largely invented. Why is that? Largely invented, yes, and until fairly recently almost completely invented. I never set off with the intention of doing this, but it was almost to absorb what I’d seen and then to reinterpret it in a way that means most to me, I suppose. There’s always somewhere in the back of my mind, some place of reference that was probably a starting point, and then I allow the composition to develop.

Let’s take Whitbarrow from Lindale, across Witherslack Bay as an example. What was the element that kickstarted that painting? With that painting, and quite a number of more recent paintings, there was very much a real landscape as a starting point. I was always interested in what the Lake District might be like if it had clear blue seas and crashing waves, so this painting was a personal indulgence to imagine what that might be like. Whitbarrow is a real place, Lindale is a real place

ABOVE Whitbarrow from Lindale, Across Witherslack Bay, oil on linen, 61x102cm no specific idea where the painting will go, and I just quickly whip some marks down and start to see how it goes from there.

There’s no pattern to every painting, I have a number of different ways of working. A lot of it is about trying to gently coax an image out without being too pushy with the idea.

Do you tend to work on more than one painting at the same time? Yes, the one that develops quickest tends to dominate, but I’ve always got several paintings on the go at the same time. Like all good things, one leads onto another and one good painting becomes the catalyst for the next.

What does a typical day in the studio look like for you? I tend to work evenings and the early hours – I’m very much a night owl. If it’s going well, I don’t feel like stopping. I don’t have a very strict routine. Sometimes I’ll only come in for an hour or two, sometimes it’s 14 hours of solid work. I mostly use Michael Harding and Winsor & Newton oil paints. I was very lucky to be gifted some tubes of paint by the wives of a couple of old painters who sadly died recently. They gave me some wonderful old tubes of Cobalt Blue and Cremnitz White, which is pretty difficult to get hold of now. Cremnitz White is a superb pigment.

I use linen canvas predominantly and I always prime it with rabbit-skin glue and oil-based primer, very traditional. I used to make my own stretchers but that took too much time, so I just buy commercially-made

Understanding science is really important… If you’re inventing a sky, you need to know how the atmosphere works

ones from R Jackson & Sons in Liverpool or I stretch my own with Loxley stretcher bars.

Do you use mediums? Yes. I sometimes put wax into paint, not to thicken it up but to get a less glossy surface as the painting develops. Sometimes I use a white paraffin wax with turpentine in, sometimes I use Wallace Seymour’s Beeswax Impasto Medium or C Roberson & Co.’s Impasto Medium. They give a semi-matt finish.

I use Winsor & Newton’s Underpainting White as a base coat usually with an earth colour mixed in to start a painting off, then I add washes of colour in turpentine onto the dry base. As a painting develops, I increase the amount of medium and then the washes become glazes.

Do you ever look at other paintings from a technical point of view? Oh yes. I get as close as I can to see how the surface has been developed. That’s where I learn a lot. I remember I so admired Velázquez’s The Waterseller of Seville, I had a small illustration of it.

There is a little drop of water running down the jug in the foreground and, when I saw the real painting in a show way back in the 1980s, I went up to it and I realised this little drop of water was just a couple of flicks of paint. I’d thought it was this precise detail but close up you see the dexterity of those little flicks.

BELOW Western Landscape, oil on linen, 122x152cm

I see that in your work too: Retreat (Maulds Meaburn as a State of Mind) has really abstract marks in the foreground. With areas like that, do you always intend to leave them looser or were you going to finish them but then decided against it? It’s more like that. When I look at [the work of John Everett] Millais and the Pre-Raphaelites, I’m impressed by all that fine detail, but when it comes to [my own] painting, I’m more excited by a loose, almost abstract way of working. It has the freshness of the natural world without that meticulous precision which might kill it off.

That painting also has a lovely low tonal range. What’s the key to maintaining visual interest across the whole painting? I suppose there are a number of focal points in the painting with the windows in the houses and the lights. It’s based on a real village called Maulds Meaburn, but it’s very much a reinvention. The goalposts on the right-hand side aren’t there, but I really liked putting them in. It gave another focal point.

Your palette is very muted. Could you say a little about how you modulate the colours? I like to limit my palette and I tend to use the same ones all the time. I’m very keen on the earth colours, plus Cobalt Blue, Prussian Blue, Viridian and Yellow Ochre to make greens. I tend to keep that [limited palette] until I can’t get any more out of it and then, when I absolutely have to, I will turn to more saturated, higher chroma paints to make stronger greens, for example.

This approach goes right back to college days. The tutor told me to just go out and paint so I chose a very limited palette of Prussian Blue, Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre and white to see how far I could go with it.

The colour in Western Landscape is very striking with that fire in the centre echoed in the rocks and clouds. How did that all develop? I’d started to put darker colours and tones down, and there was this space in the middle – initially it was going to be a pathway, but I sort of ignored it for a while. In the end, I said it’s going to be a fire. By that time, I already had painted the distant clouds and I loved the pairing of the orange sunset with that fire. Symbolically it doesn’t mean

I like to limit my palette… When I absolutely have to, I will turn to more saturated paints

anything at all, it just felt like the right thing to do.

Does the subject dictate the marks you make or the brushes you use? To a certain extent, yes. I will use the paintbrushes and the mark making to effectively describe a subject, I suppose. I’m working on these oak trees at the moment and I’m putting down thousands of tiny little marks, still with a bristle brush.

I try to avoid using tiny sables if I can, so I use very small, very clean, well-used bristle brushes. Then if it is a broader area like the sky, it requires a size 14 filbert to get these lovely organic, soft areas of paint. I think of it almost like collage, but with mark making.

When does a painting finish for you? You just get to a point where the surface is developed enough and adding more would be unnecessary really. You can feel the sense of balance in the whole painting.

ABOVE Little Alpine (Foxfield Allotment to Cow How and Birch Fell), oil on canvas, 76x91cm