Landscape With Ruins

Martin Greenland

The realism convinces me so much in this painting that it is difficult to believe that only ten years have passed since the relative crudity of the first Released. In fact there are only two somewhat prominent things which don’t convince, things which I knew didn’t work at the time which I will come to in a moment.

The title ‘Landscape With Ruins’ came to me some way into the painting, but worked perfectly in this post-modern place as the title was used often by artists from the time of neo-classicism to describe the decay of classical ruins. I had been working increasingly with those things, objects encountered in the rural landscape which I was constantly discovering and which I knew were a violation, and urban encroachment on the rural place. But I also knew that the idea of rural arcadia has always been a myth.

I have created a fictional place and populated it with the sort of things I was encountering. Discarded things, junk, trashed cars, black plastic sacks which could contain…who knows what. There are the lions on plinths, forgotten, moss covered. In the foreground there is a stone plinth or gatepost, the top of which has been stolen, just leaving the rusting iron spike which would have held it all together. There is a discarded mattress which is overgrown with brambles. In the foreground is a rusting, stolen safe, its back cut open.
The fulchrum of the painting is the golden Minotaur which swaggers around, brandishing a high powered hand gun with silencer. Apart from the exciting challenge in rendering objects to look like gold, I had a particular desire to comment on the glamourisation of the criminal; the criminal becoming ‘bling’ in itself. In this character I wanted to show something of the aggressive side of masculinity and also something in the way that the modern criminal is also (sadly) the perfect existentialist.

Again I have developed the lighting in the foreground to create the effect of a flash being fired. The only things which I think I could have improved upon is the concrete still attatched to the safe , which looks a bit woolly, and the bracken (fiddle-head fern), a plant of such primitive simplicity in its fractal structure yet so difficult to get right in painting.

In spit of these things I am especially pleased with this painting. If I fail today, I look at it to remind me of just how good I can be.

Just don’t forget that its TOTALLY invented.