Martin Kinnear is a disabled contemporary painter currently completing an MA in painting with the RCA London. (born 1969, Burnley, lives and works in London, UK).

In my current work at The Royal College of Art, I continue to explore contemporary figuration, as a space in which figural painting is sublated into and back from abstraction. Using expressive figure drawing as a point of departure, I develop ambiguous works in which background, foreground, and subject are in flux, creating paintings that both have and offer agency.

My process begins with expressive figure drawing, which serves as a foundation for creating intricate and ambiguous works. In these pieces, the boundaries between the background, foreground, and subjects become fluid, allowing the viewer to experience a dynamic interplay that evokes both movement and stillness, giving the paintings a powerful sense of agency.

Throughout my work, the suggestion of the human form emerges and dissolves through layered mark-making. These marks reflect the complexities and nuances of identity, memory, and perception, revealing the elusive nature of our existence.

My compulsion to capture presence and absence stems from my personal journey of recovery after enduring a devastating brain injury. Through my practice, I aim to express a profound understanding of the impermanence of life and celebrate the beauty that lies within imperfection, portraying my lived experience of resilience and transformation.

Recent Exhibitions & Awards 

2024

MA Painting: RCA (24/25)

9 Oct - 16 Nov Messums London. Emerging Landscape Painting Today (selected for extended online show and symposium)

2023

October: Invited exhibitor and speaker University of Durham. Elected SCR.

April 7th - 16th Chaiya Art Awards - Southbank London

19th April - 7th May: Martin Kinnear. New Works, Solo Show Tennants Gallery, North Yorkshire

June 9th - 16th - The Gallery at Sedbury ,Richmond 

2022

Martin Kinnear, Societie Nationale des Beaux Arts Salon, Paris.

Martin Kinnear, Regeneration, Solo Show, The Bowes Museum, County Durham

Martin Kinnear. Works from Regeneration, Solo Show ,Tennants Gallery, North Yorkshire

2021

Martin Kinnear, Landscapes of The North, Solo Show, Tennants Gallery, North Yorkshire

2020

Martin Kinnear, 'Backstreet Burnley', Govt. Art Collection for Downing St

Martin Kinnear, Lefty's North, Solo Show, Tennants Gallery, North Yorkshire

Artist in Residence, Norman Cornish Retrospective, The Bowes Museum.

2019

Martin Kinnear, Societie Nationale des Beaux Arts Salon, Paris.

The Holt Festival, Auden Gallery, Holt. 

2018

Martin Kinnear, Beyond Here, Solo Show, Tennants Gallery, North Yorkshire

Martin Kinnear, Societie Nationale des Beaux Arts Salon, Paris.

Awarded Medaille d' Argent for Peinture. 

2017

Iona Gallery, Woodstock, Oxon. 

2016

Martin Kinnear, The Painted Garden, Solo Show, New British Art Gallery, Norfolk

Critical Response ‘Burnley (oil on canvas) was duly selected for the Government Art Collection (GAC) and it hangs at Downing Street, there to be admired by the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. On the GAC website it is described thus: “landscape 21stC, industrial, urban, bin, street, terraced house, chimney”. If that isn’t the perfect counterpoint to a Lulu Lytle interior, then I don’t know what is. But if that blunt inventory sounds bleak, the Kinnear painting style is anything but. With deft brushstrokes and exuberant swathes of colour, he elevates grittiness to something rich and magisterial.’ (David Whetsone, Art Critic. Cultured North East, Jan 2022).

Martin Kinnear: Painting is what I do.

One can have various motivations to paint. I have never needed one because for me the act of painting is the point of doing it. I know this to be true because when I found myself hemiplegic and unable to leave a hospital ward in which I was confined, I painted from a wheelchair next to my bed.

This was the first time my work had a subject– I was no longer painting because it was what I did, but because it remained to me. Painting became an act of defiance against the intrusion that becoming suddenly disabled imposed. I learned then, that no matter what you intend to paint, the subject chooses you.

Using oils, household paints, gloss, enamel, dry media and other mismatched materials I build works which mirror my own acceptance of imperfection and speak of how I have come to find opportunity through making things which should not work, work in a new way.   

Painting is an act of war on my disability. I work big, creating and recreating images from unlikely mismatches of materials, often over and incorporating old works to find new and unexpected fusions of what I intended;  and what I got.

In this way each work becomes a series of emerging opportunities which coalesce into works which speak to me of finding sense, and even beauty in imperfection. By degrees my unwilling materials and repurposed underpaintings became layered and contradictory works about impossibly fragmented bodies which mirror my own recovery, gardens which speak to me of regrowth or landscapes which suggest the impossibility of permanence

Working big is my mind’s opening and unacceptable position to one handed spasticity. Two forces in opposition; my unyielding mind and spastic body mean that each work becomes a negotiated settlement, the embodiment of a hard fought truce between what I wanted and what I got. You can’t have a future without a past, so I have learned to accept, that for me, imperfection is inevitable; I carry on and embrace it.

For the last 20 years I have fought against the insistence of painting to impose a subject upon me, but have come to accept that all painting done honestly is always a self-portrait: I am the subject, of paintings about what it is to be imperfect. 

For someone like me who doesn't want to be disabled this is problematic. As long as I live, I will paint. And as long as I am alive, my work can only be a mirror. I don't often like what I see, but I do it anyway.