Martin Kinnear (40),moved to the coast to paint and is completely self taught, having taken up his brushes in 2000, after a career in advertising.
He sites the influence of many great landscape painters in his work particularly Corot, Seago, Brown, Constable and Ruisdael - for as he says, ‘although I am self taught these artists showed me how to see.’
’Most people consider my work to be traditional rather than contemporary - by which they usually mean abstract, ‘ he adds, ‘ In fact all painting is fundamentally abstracton; I merely choose to draw the line earlier than Rothko but a little later than Constable.’
Martin has won several awards for his luminous depictions of the Norfolk skies and brooding marshlands, and works exclusively in oils, because,’they have the technical potential to capture the light here through scumbles of broken colour and transluscent glazes.’
With collectors as far afield as Australia and the States, Martin is fast becoming established as a painter of the unique character of the North Norfolk coast.
Martin founded and runs one of the UK's fastest growing oil painting schools; the 'Norfolk Painting School' which offers short courses in the lost art of traditional oil painting to both professional artists, and serious hobby painters. find out more at www.norfolkpaintingschool.com
Martin contributes articles on traditional oil techniques to several national and international specialist art magazines including 'The Artist' 'Artists & Illustrators' and the UK based SAA 'Paint' magazine. The School's publishing company St Luke Press, will be releasing his first book ' The Studio Workbook' ion January 2010.
Statement
I decided to teach myself to paint in 2000, after a succesful career in advertising. Starting from nothing, I had and have, no art theoretical axe to grind; for me painting was and is simply a pleasure.
My work is based on what I love rather than what is guaranteed to create a stir; I'm not interested in shocking or subscribing to the herd instinct that deems what is, and what is not good - I leave that to art degree graduates. For the record I love the big and cumulative effect of light, the feeling of transient weather, colour and beauty. I dislike slavish detail, political art (propaganda), and art calculated to shock, nauseate or titilate.
Similiarly I have no time for art snobs and elitism - the kind of painters who bolster their work by nerdishly making canvases, insisting on only oil primed linen supports, or using obsolete historical materials; painting should be good enough not to need these props. Great artists manage with whatever is at hand, and art critics by definition can only argue what should be done after the event, and at second hand
I never forget that at the close of the millennium the most popular paintings in the UK were still ones done without the intellectual garnish of an Abstract or Neo 'ism'. Art must move on of course, but I don't accept it has to do so in the face of popular taste; or it simply becomes self referential.
On the other hand I think everybody should have the opportunity to paint, and have worked hard to de-mystify and popularise traditional painting techniques at my Norfolk Painting School. My curriculum there is based on teaching the building blocks of painting, by drawing on examples from the Old Masters - not to copy or even emulate, but simply to learn.
Over the last ten years I have been fortunate enough to provide real painting, for real enthusiasts, without loosing sight of the fact that painting is communication by other means, rather than an aesthetic excercise in Art Theory; as Constable said 'for me Painting is simply another word for feeling.'
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