Martin Greenland

Like Northern Landscape, Western Landscape is a re-invention of a place which is very, very familiar to me. For this reason, it was actually more difficult to re-invent on this occasion because all the time I felt drawn to fashioning the land as I know it.
The real place is a great slab of carboniferous limestone hill just a few miles from my home. On it grows a natural garden of stunted and grazed shrubs, both evergreen and deciduous which have been wind brushed for possibly centuries. Some are minute, like bonsai, some, like many of the Yews, seem to have been moulded around the dry, grey rocks like stiff green velvet.

It is a place only crossed by paths, and I visit it many times each year, always in the Summer, and usually in the evening, staying up on the hill or in the forest which slowly descends down its eastern flank, until midnight, when the silence is only broken by owls or barking deer and I delight in detecting the light even in the darkest places.

It is a place of changing scale and broad spectrum and in the height of Summer it is like being on an Aegean island. Being so perfect it was so tempting to paint it ‘as it is’. Being me, I had to re-invent the whole place so that the painting and its component parts spoke completely of the essence of the real place. I increasingly acknowledge that the bottom line, the reasoning behind why I invent, beyond the personal satisfaction and excitement in doing so, is that each work is a confirmation to myself that I have observed and more importantly, understood, the world I encounter.

The fire which burns in the centre was originally destined to be the pool of light beneath a lamp-post. Having decided that this motif, which crops up many times in my work, was not fitting this time, I allowed the strong Burnt Sienna underpainting to remain. As the cooler colours started to develop, this pool of light naturally started to look like fire. I have no explanation for why there might be a fire here in ths place. The title ‘Western Landscape’ deliberately suggested that this may be a place habited by ‘cowboys’, where a camp fire is often a feature in ‘Cowboy’ films, but really refers to the fact that the original place is on the west coast of England and the verdant nature of the hill is a result of this westerly position.