Messums London
Emerging Landscape Painting Today 9 OCT - 16 NOV '24
Thrilled to be selected for the online exhibition and symposium by Messums London. ‘we are excited to present a broader selection of artists through an online exhibition, fostering a wider conversation about the dynamic field of landscape art today. Both exhibitions will be supported by an online symposium, to discuss these elements and bring together all these voices.’
Featured The Times, London 19 August 2024
MA Painting at the Royal College of Art
You make your own luck in this life but even so I’m delighted to have been lucky enough to be accepted to study Painting at the World’s No 1 Art University , the RCA. True, it’s taken me over thirty years to earn both the money and the time to study there - but as I’ve learned only too well , you really only do live once, and if it’s late in the day; we have to chase our Sun.
Delighted to be chosen to be the great artist for St Mary’s College, a pioneering women’s college within Durham University, where I’ll be presenting a body of work highlighting the dissonance between academic privilege and the reality of the urban North East.
An Elegy for the Dales
A show about how the places we make, come in time to make us.
From Burnley to Downing St
When Boris Johnson won the election on the back of the so called Red Wall seats , I sent him a picture of what it looked like to focus his mind on levelling up. To his credit it now hangs in Downing Street, as Art critic David Whetstone reported for Cultured North East.
‘Regeneration is both the exhibition’s title and its theme. It’s a bounce back after the darkest days of the pandemic and a nod to what the North is and might become if the Government delivers on its ‘levelling up’ promises.
The artist tells me that after Boris Johnson won the election by breaching the ‘red wall’, a thought entered his head: “What he needs is a picture of Burnley on his wall.
“I sent half a dozen pictures down to him as pdfs, explaining why I thought he should have one of them. I wanted a picture of the North to be right in front of him.”
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.’
BBC Look North Feature 20.01. 2022
The BBC filmed Martin during the installation of Regeneration and asked how he went from the council estates of East Lancashire to the Paris Salon, Downing St and The Bowes Museum to bring his message about transformative change to life.