Original Paintings

The largest painting Martin has made: a triptych 400 x 240 cm, in acrylic on canvas. It was commissioned to celebrate the Heidelberg mountains, which stretch from Somerset West towards Stellenbosch, for a client's wife who grew up in that part of the Cape.

The fynbos is in the foreground and the sky is the blue Cape Town is known for. It took just over two months to paint.

Heidelberg Harvest. Original commission, acrylic on canvas, 400 x 240 cm framed. Tap the picture to see it larger.

Janis Joplin

"I wanted this piece to capture the vibrancy and wild energy that made her an icon, as well as the bittersweet edge of her story. As a member of the so called 27 Club, her life was tragically short, but her influence has never faded."

The reference is Jim Marshall's famous photograph from 1969, with Janis perched on her Porsche 356 Cabriolet in San Francisco. Commissioned, mixed media on canvas, 190 x 135 cm. Tap the picture to see it larger.

Jackie and Jimmy

The one that stops people in the room. Jimi Hendrix as a musical superhero whose influence leaves nobody untouched, here colouring the polished elegance of Jackie Kennedy into something more rebellious.

The idea began with the famous Time cover of John F. Kennedy, reimagined as a surreal meeting between the two: the establishment on one side, wild creative freedom on the other, and each one bending the other a little out of shape.

Original commission, mixed media on aluminium, 160 x 120 cm. Tap the picture to see it larger.

Manic Monday is a tribute to Jackson Pollock: oil paint layered over ultra chrome ink, 180 x 140 cm. Pollock said his work had no beginning and no end, and no single area of interest to break the pattern, and this follows that idea.

Underneath it are hundreds of words and sentences, printed into the background and then deliberately hidden under the splatters and drips, so that no phrase is ever fully revealed. In person it rewards standing still in front of it.

See Manic Monday in the gallery

About half of Martin's paintings are on canvas, and about half on an aluminium substrate, which is less usual and worth explaining.

"I paint on an aluminium substrate for three reasons. The first is that the aluminium I use has a texture embedded in it, which gives the paint something to grip.

The second is that aluminium is one of the best surfaces there is to paint on. It is far better than pressed board, masonite or supawood, because it is completely acid free, so it does not need a barrier layer between the surface and the paint.

The third is that it is hard, so it stands up to handling. It takes a great deal to damage it. Paint on stretched canvas and if the canvas is pressed hard enough it will dent, and the canvas has to be re-stretched to get it flat again. Many artists paint on canvas and then mount it onto pressed board or plywood, but that brings in glue and the acid in the wood, so it becomes less archival, not more."

"I cannot remember why I started painting on aluminium, but I am very pleased I found it. The only drawback is that you cannot roll it into a tube to ship it. It needs a crate. And it is a light aluminium, not the weight you would expect from metal.

The interesting part is that from across the room you would not know the difference between a painting on aluminium and one on canvas. Up close you will see the canvas weave in the canvas painting, especially where the paint is thin. With aluminium you will not see it at all."

The painting here, Emerald Serenity, looks like one place. It is not. "The farmhouse is in the Tankwa Karoo. The cluster of trees was a stand on a hill along the Garden Route, near a place called Riviersonderend, the river without end. The fence line was photographed in the seaside village of Scourie in Scotland." Two of those are in the Western Cape, and one is 9,000 kilometres away.

Those fragments were painted into a single scene, with the ground worked up to suggest the soil and structures hidden below, and the rocky terrain to speak of what is built on top of it.

Twilight Hues on Country Lane, in the fold-down below, uses the same farmhouse from another angle, with a telephone pole and a winding road photographed on a farm called Bo Plaas, a forest painted in that was never there, and a sky invented entirely in layers of paint.

That is the method: photographs gathered over years, from the Karoo to the Scottish coast, brought together into one painted place that never existed.

A student's own painting from an earlier workshop, palette knife on canvas, signed by them.

Martin teaches the way he paints, from the surface up, on the Art of Painting Workshop in Montagu in the Western Cape. Five days, six hours a day at the easel, with the cameras out at first light and again in the late afternoon to gather reference for what you are painting.

He and Samantha Lee Osner are both in the room for all of it, so the guidance is on your painting and your decisions rather than one exercise everyone does at once. Short demonstrations when there is something worth showing, palette knife, loose brushwork, knowing when to stop, then straight back onto your own canvas.

Nobody is taught to paint like Martin. They are taught to paint like themselves, which is why the same five days and the same landscape produce six paintings that look nothing alike. You leave with a finished painting, not a study to complete at home.

The next group runs 16 to 20 August 2027, Monday to Friday, and it is kept small.

See the painting workshop