Disabled contemporary painter Martin Kinnear (b. Burnley, Uk, based in London) is known for creating thematic shows about self-perception, imperfection and change informed by his experience of physical disability and social exclusion.

Working from poems or ‘word sketches’, Kinnear slowly creates layered and contradictory paintings which explore the role of absences and ambiguity in formulating our self-concept.

Through expressive figurative marks which  communicate whilst also withholding narrative, Kinnear intends the visual consumption of his work to reveal the difference between what we appear to be and whom we are echoing Auden’s observation about ‘the flesh the mind insists is ours.

He is best known for large-scale contemporary triptychs featuring optically layered and partially excavated oils, gloss, enamel, dry media and encaustic paints (e.g. Lethe {exh. Regeneration at The Bowes Museum County Durham}, 2022).

Notable exhibitions: Regeneration at The Bowes Museum (public gallery), County Durham.

Collections: Government Art Collection UK, Collection of St Mary’s College, University of Durham.

Participated in: Chaiya Art Awards (biennial), SNBA Salon de Beaux-Arts, Paris 2022, SNBA Salon des Beaux-Arts, Paris 2019, SNBA Salon des Beaux-Arts, Paris 2018.

Notable Shows: His most notable show to date, Regeneration(The Bowes Museum County Durham), featured a work chosen by the then Prime Minister for the UK Government Art Collection, and demonstrated how he creates work of ‘how the world we make, comes in time to make us’. Kinnear also participated in three consecutive Paris Salons of the Societie Nationale des Beaux Arts in 2018-19-22. (participation in the salon was suspended in ‘21 for foreign nationals in and the event cancelled in ‘20 for Covid reasons).

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 worked out well because I physiotherapists rewarded me with better food for making the effort to mobilise. I would have done so anyway.

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 on my settled reality that becoming suddenly disabled imposed upon my capacity. I learned that no matter what one intends to paint, the subject of your work chooses you. I don't like letting the world see what I have become, but because I paint, I do it anyway. 

Painting is an act of war on my disability. I work big, creating and recreating fusions of impossibly twisted bodies and the will which animates us creating layered oil paintings until they coalesce into works which ask more about how we exist than tell. 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 each work becomes an accretion of imperfectly realised attempts. Each painting is 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 anyway.

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. 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, that work can only be a mirror. I don't like what I see, but I do it anyway.  

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).