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Martin Devine

Artist's Interview

How long have you been creating?: Must be around 6 or 7 years. I was about 34 when I decided to attend a drawing and painting evening class, with the only goal being to try something new. After 3 or 4 classes, the artist tutor told me I should take it further. I laughed, thinking she meant to attend another class session or similar, but she told me to get a portfolio together to apply for art college! I took this advice with a pinch of salt, but carried on my newly found hobby in my spare time. It was around 2000 that I tentatively asked at the Highland Wildlife Park in Scotland if they would display some of my work (at the time I was drawing wildlife). They looked at my work, and said go ahead, and a few weeks later I was mounting my work on their walls when someone came up to me and bought the first work I was hanging - a charcoal sketch of a solitary Highlander Cattle. Over the next two or three years I gradually lowered my hours in my office job to spend more time drawing and painting, until eventually shaking off the 9-5 totally in 2003.

What is your medium of choice?: At the moment, watercolour, however gouache, oil, acrylic, sprays, pencil, charcoal, and pastel are never far away. I see myself as very much still experimenting and learning, but then I guess I always will. For the moment, watercolour is dominating, as I love the way it continually rebels against control, trying to assert its belief that it has its own mind. Great stuff.

What are your motivations for creating?: At first it was simply personal enjoyment. I now also believe drawing and painting can reach everyone somehow, and they take their own message or feelings from it - I love the feedback I get from collectors, it is always fascinating to see what someone takes from a painting. I don't think messages from a painter need be fixed, the viewer plays a big (if not bigger) part.

What other artists and movements inform your work?: Phew, this is a difficult one to me. Other people have told me they see differing clashes of some of : colour field, minimal, modern, colourist, and abstract in my current series of landscapes. All very interesting. But I can only say what I have perhaps looked and thought on longer : Aspects of minimalism, Bridget Riley, Picasso nudes, Da Vinci drawings, Rothko, and in my mind the two biggest cornerstones of art history, Manet and Cezanne. How this informs my work ? I think I will leave that to someone else to answer !

What do you find stimulating right now? How does this influence your creative process?: I keep finding myself looking back at the Scottish Colourists work recently. I think I have an inkling to paint more oil, and something is stirring in my head around all of this, but I haven't quite dug it out of my brain. More recent and again close to home for me, the work of Eduardo Paolozzi, who sadly died last month.

Read anything good lately?: A pulp fiction book I cant even remember the name of, it bored me so - was a poor mans version of a the Da Vinci Code. Unusually for me, I finished it even though I didn't enjoy one page of it ... I knew I had a gentle masochist thing somewhere in my depths. At the moment, I am reading "How mumbo-jumbo conquered the world" by Francis Wheen. A quote ... "the House of Lords held a full length parliamentary debate on UFOs in 1979, during which it was revealed that not all aliens came from space: some emerged through tunnels from a civilisation beneath the earths crust. One Lords member said, "I haven't been down there myself, but from what I gather they are very advanced." This is true.

Tell us a little about your unique approach to the landscape.: I see the landscape as a near blank canvas that folk cover with stuff. I try to strip the stuff a little and reveal some of the simplicity, a bit of the essence of the view. What interests me is what the remaining reveals of the country, region, town or whatever, and of its people. Or if you will, I paint "minimal landscapes", verging on "distant-abstract", with a pinch of modernism and a sprinkling of colour. So it is said.

What would you like your fellow EBSQ artists and collectors to know about you and or your work?: About my work, I've said too much already ! People should take from it as they see fit, but always leaving some for someone else. About me ? I'm 6 foot five, dark hair, handsome James Bond looks (you pick which one), wealthy, compassionate, sensitive, and have a healthy addiction to hugely exaggerating my appearance. Beyond that, I am a painter now, and always will be.