PINK DELI and Other Works - Martin Hearne

My paintings are about daily life and a visual celebration of the ordinary. 

A group of people stood on a street corner, a shop window full of colourful mannequins, people traveling up and down on an escalator these aspects of peoples lived experience have value and agency as routine activities.

In painting I'm concerned with the reality of my subject and the subjective feelings I have about it. Two concerns that exist in a sort of paradox,  a paradox that cannot be resolved. Nor should it be resolved as this is the space which is conducive to the making of a painting.

I make extensive use of photographs mainly ones I've taken myself, sometime drawings and sketches from memory. The paintings are contrived from these different sources and added or removed in a long process of trial and error. Nothing ever seems to be finished and recognising this end point is an important moment. As the fictional detective says when looking for clues "we'll know it when we see it"