Martin Grover ARE
Martin is a painter and screen printer based in South London. Having graduated from the Royal Academy Schools sometime last century he has worked consistently and exhibited extensively, embarking on a wayward artistic odyssey.
His love of and affinity to screen printing became apparent from the moment he was first properly introduced to it in 1981. From the outset he preferred the reduction technique rather than the photographic and now digital processes most commonly associated with contemporary screen printing. His stencils are created by painting directly onto the screen using a combination of screen block and screen painting fluid. The technique is simple but can become strikingly complex.
Largely influenced by the traditions of English romanticism and American and European realism, Martin’s work skilfully combines narratives of childhood, elegiac decay, old records, procrastination, wild flowers, sheds and shelters. These reflective, intriguing, acutely observed and finely composed images resonate with a wry humour and subtle melancholy. Grover’s keenly executed works invite you to reflect on the passage of time; a heartfelt exploration of our shared journey.
His most recent work continues along this whimsical and disparate path and sees him continue with his series of plaintive tree stump images.
Wandering around the great Brockwell Park in South London he is constantly inspired by the gnarly, truncated trees that haunt and punctuate the landscape. Melancholic relics; tragic and beautiful, sentinel yet vulnerable. They appear in his works as harbingers of doom, ghostly apparitions or loom up like giants and goliaths; while others lay supine, felled, humiliated and exposed.
