ART STATEMENT

      My images are the evidence of my personal struggle to accept and find beauty in my immediate world. In a broader sense, I want to understand our attachment to our environment, our sense of place. For me it means keeping an eye on the past and recognizing the demands of the immediate. Underwriting everything is my need for discovery and inventiveness. My work succeeds or fails, in my estimation, on whether or not it fulfils those expectations. I keep my tools simple; color, eye, hand and surface, simply because my interest lies in the evidence of quest, the one painting I am doing, and not the technique or the business of art.

      Historically I get energy from Pieter Bruegle, the Elder. His images recede into the far distance, still giving story upon story, beautifully told to the observer. One only has to be familiar with his painting of Golgotha or the frail legs of Icarus the moment before they disappear into the sea, to realize what can be achieved pictorially. True to life, a great drama is woven into a context where all events are happening all the time. I need the unsought gifts of the mundane to balance the tragic. My nature will not accept a world without hope. My motivation is to pass on images of survival and normalcy, within the context of what we know globally to be true. That they also have a beauty is natural to the tilt of my heart. I react with aesthetic pleasure at the sombre iridescence of an oil slick or crumbling surface of tar macadam. The resolute recalcitrance of a child pleases me more than a posed portrait. I enjoy the poorly pressed and over used. I come from a school of thought that recognizes the grace of simple pleasures and fears the loss of natural contentment. I look for commonality, constancy and find nourishment in who we are. I owe it recognition.


      Ann Martin