As he approaches his ninetieth birthday, David Martin is painting with the same astonishing energy and inventiveness that I encountered on my first visit to his studio in 1993. On that occasion David solved the problem of how to view a lot of paintings together in the relatively tight space of his dining room by bringing the work out of the studio while I arranged them around the room until every available inch was lit by his unmistakable palette.

We would balance the canvases edge to edge, resting against chairs, the table or a bookcase in order to get some idea of how the exhibition might appear in its entirety, a continuing routine that I still anticipate with enormous pleasure. Choosing his work for an exhibition is difficult, not on account of the confined space, but simply because there is rarely a painting you would want to leave out: his fluency as a painter is only matched by his remarkable consistency.

As landscape follows still life with few words of comment from David you realise how effortlessly he is able to unravel the constituent parts of a subject, rebuilding them into a mesmerising collision of colours, shapes and patterns. Striking out on each picture with either a quick landscape sketch or some rudimentary props for a still life, David works with a calm assurance that new and original ideas can be conjured simply with paint and imagination. An infinite number of possibilities wait in each empty canvas and this certainty, the knowledge that he will always be able to surprise himself as well as us, maintains that constant fascination with painting.

David Martin’s paintings require every element in the composition to carry a clear purpose. Each mark of colour is needed as the visual tinder to ignite an adjacent passage of paint just as the pattern of a field, curtain or wallpaper, will give a rhythm to a series of flat planes nearby. There is nothing extraneous or haphazard.

David is a meticulous painter and assembles each painting as carefully as a composer orchestrates a melody. His formal training at Glasgow School of Art in the 1940‘s may have provided the tools of his craft but for the last seventy years his art has been sustained and driven by the pleasure of painting alone. At the age of ninety, with an unmatched depth of experience as a painter, what keeps his work so fresh is his delight in the endless possibilities that painting provides. In this group of twenty six works painted in 2011 and 2012, the exuberance and joy of his work is as evident as his exceptional technical skills.

John Martin Gallery
38 Albemarle Street, 
London W1S 4JG, United Kingdom
Tel +44 (0)20 7499 1314
Fax +44 (0)20 7493 2842
info@jmlondon.com
www.jmlondon.com

Opening Hours
From Monday to Friday 10am – 6pm
Saturday 11am – 4pm or by appointment
Please note: the gallery is closed on Bank Holiday weekends