Martyn Lucas
artist | curator | educator
Collage, 2024, 20.5x20.5cm
Collage, 2024, 20x20cm
Collage, 2024, 20.5x20.5cm
Collage, 2024, 20x20cm
Collage, 2024, 18.5x18.5cm
Collage, 2024, 17x23cm
collages
Recent studio work
Collages derived from memories of landscape and found images. Several works are available to purchase. Enquire via contact page.
When a painting is ‘on hold’, then I might switch to collage, which essentially involves working with found images – quite often a vintage postcard, cut up paintings, old books and colour swatches. The postcards contain memories in a particular way; either from my own visits to places and bought by me as a child or collected as an adult of places that I remember. There is a conversation between the two techniques, and one informs the other. Both involve a slow process.
Small scale and often richly coloured, these collages initiate a conversation about landscape, memory and human intervention. The materials of their making (found images, painted brush marks and flat colour swatches) construct an abstracted scene; a disrupted view, suggestive of stasis but also moving through. Often worked on pages from old art books or vintage postcards, two or three hard-edged, geometric elements are introduced which generate a kind of narrative. They might have their origin in my noticing a bright pink wrapped hay bale in a field or a red brick wall in front of some trees. The shapes enter like characters on a stage, playing out in front of a landscape backdrop. The works are small, simple and can look effortless, but take time to resolve. Compositional balance and visual pleasure, engaging eye and imagination.