As John Berger wrote “seeing comes before words” and it is the vibrancy of colours, the scale and the forms of Martin Laurance's landscapes that impact on our eyes. Ours is an immediately emotional response to the breadth and depth of his portrayal of coastlines and uninhabited fields, building and boats. Whatever the physical dimensions of the picture, each painting seems monumental. In purely aesthetic terms, it is the artist's process of working between oils and other media that enables abstract elements to engage so well with his representation of a specific location. As John Allen of Mandell's Gallery says “his artworks can contain found paper pertaining to the subject, a shipping chart used as the basis for a coastal view, with layered paper and collage.” Colour is essential to Martin's paintings. Or, more correctly, light (which makes colour) is essential. And thereby, so is light's opposite, the darkness. Whether in his paintings or monochrome studies the artist is not afraid to pitch the black sky or the black silhouette against the light. This technique is so effective in a mixed media work like 'After The Storm, Bacton III.' In this haunting portrayal of Bacton, Norfolk we can feel the storm, see the battered and broken breakers, while the clouds remain hanging over the scene (enclosing the scene) like a threat. The play between the representation of a location at a particular time and the abstract qualities of the artist's rendering of his subject create great potency. The smaller study 'Still Evening, Orford Ness' alludes to its past but is not locked into its past as the shoreline changes daily. As in 'Abandoned Mineworks, West Cornwall,' here are modern ruins of our industrial society at the edge our land, now hammered by storms and tides that maybe the product of that society. I suspect landscape painting is often overlooked because it can be static, over worked and sentimental – and can even be sentimentalized over the passage of time. Yet, many of the great leaps forward in painting have taken place through landscape painting (Turner and Cezanne spring to mind). Indeed, the best of landscape painting, in my mind, seems to capture a sense of movement – within the subject and on the canvas. Martin Laurance's work stands in this visceral tradition.

I asked myself the other day, 'what is a good painting?' My answer was one that is captivating and honest, meaning that it rewards close inspection or repeated viewing and truly expresses the artist's feelings. I have bought, lived with and exhibited Martin Laurance's landscapes for over twenty years. Needless to say, I find them good paintings!

It is not only the immediate energy, vibrancy and power of Martin's landscapes that captivates me but also the previously unseen details that I discover each time I look at them. In a very honest way they capture Martin's experience of particular places, mostly walked and sketched by him many times, and his response to the unique rhythm, energy and history that each has.

I never tire of 'looking at a Laurance' and you only have to accompany Martin on one of his many walks or look at his wonderful sketchbooks (works of art in themselves) to appreciate why his landscapes are often described as being 'painted with a passion'.

When you meet Martin Laurance for the first time, you realise that you have just encountered a very tall man, who is quietly spoken and highly observant of everything around him. From his enviable height, he surveys the landscapes he visits. But Martin does not just look – he simultaneously walks in that landscape and absorbs the feel of a place, frequently returning to territory which is familiar to him – but seeing it afresh in new light or weather conditions. I love Martin Laurance’s work – it has a brio and boldness which make his landscapes stay in my memory. He is an artist who is blessed with a marvellous ability to convey the essential outlines of a scene in both vibrant colour and a more brooding monochrome tonality. Confident black brushstrokes have a confident, easy fluidity, marking out linear barriers. The spaces between the lines are then often blocked in with bright rectangles of colour, balanced by areas of bright white paper or canvas. In many of his compositions, Martin seeks out locations, and views within those locations, which are on the edge or extremity of an area. Orford Ness in Suffolk and Greenhow, (one of the highest inhabited villages in England) exemplify this desire to explore remote places where the natural scenery and the built man-made world meet, or even collide. Time and again you feel that Martin Laurance’s work really does tap into the essence of a place.

East Anglian artist Martin Laurance is perhaps best known for his dramatic and colourful mixed media landscape paintings. Often on a large scale they have been described as 'full of energy, colour and confidence'. Working in mixed media on canvas or paper, the paintings have a strongly textured surface through the use of collage and other materials. Growing up as a child near the sea in Suffolk, Martin has always been drawn to the coast, the places where sea, sky and land meet. The often eroding shorelines, the constant changes of weather and light provide him with endless inspiration. Martin explains; 'My paintings have always been about my experience of being in a particular place, searching out through drawing and walking the uniqueness of that place alone. I return to the same places over and over again, returning to the studio and using this source material to create work that I hope taps into something deeper, an underlying reality.'

Martin was recently artist in residence at Orford Ness in Suffolk, the former military and nuclear testing site now managed by the National Trust. He continues to paint this beautiful and often disquieting landscape. Martin says, 'A place of endless variation and inspiration.' He has lived and painted in Norwich for many years, where he has a studio in the city centre. He has held many successful exhibitions over that time throughout the UK and internationally. His work is in many collections including the National Trust.

‘A Sense of Place’ is a most appropriate title for this exhibition of Martin Laurance’s new paintings. Whether it be the coasts of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cornwall or the North Yorkshire moors, or more recently, the quiet fields of South Norfolk, Laurance completely immerses himself in each specific location. But why? The answer is in his quest to make every painting more than just a representation of a place – to make it, as it were, once removed from the real thing and by so doing, give it so much more with his use of expressive colour and most importantly, his own energy and passion which makes the finished work so powerful.
 
The actual process of Laurance’s creative journey is often a lengthy one. He walks over the ground time and time again, making many monochrome sketches exploring and experimenting in his own mind before progressing to a study which will be worked up into a final picture. He finds the discipline of black and white drawing a challenge but it forms the basic structure of a painting to which he can add the sensuous colour for which he is renowned. Laurance often uses parts of the monochrome sketches as a collage to highlight the detail of a particular scene before he carefully adds the fluid acrylics to give the intense colour and movement he wants in the completed painting. But he is not self-limiting in his choice of materials. When he turns to larger works he uses oils to give a sense of body, of gravitas, for a sweeping landscape which requires a natural, flowing change of tone in the paint handling - but he never loses his vigour and sense of motion.
 
Laurance admires the work of Graham Sutherland who used a similar method of artistic progression from sketches to a final composition, but Laurance has developed his own technique of using the formal qualities of painting to which he has overlaid his own recognisable language and image making. He does that in order to suggest to all of us that we should stop for a longer moment to really look at our favourite landscape…… and be ready for a surprise.

Martin Laurance is an expressive painter, expressing how it feels to be at a particular place at a particular time. His style has always been bold, using colours and techniques in a way that make an inimitable statement. In recent months he has been exploring atmosphere and tonality further and utilising paint and collage more fluidly. The places remain largely the same; the never ending seas and skies of his native East Anglia, the rugged coast and hilltops of Cornwall and the wide expanse of the Yorkshire Moors, laden with mystery.

The first thing you notice about Martin Laurance's paintings are their sheer power. Large and full of vibrant and often intense colour they reach out to you with their energy and confidence. They're skilfully composed, painted with passion and at times full of motion. Laurance adopts a range of media in his landscapes and seascapes, oil, acrylic, pastel, paper, canvas and collage. Many have an almost three dimensional effect. In the road to Gourdon, Provence, acrylic/collage on canvas, strips of canvas are glued on top of the paintings to heighten the impact of the road. The paint is applied in a range of brushstrokes, both thick and fine and also in splodges of colour. Warm and cold colours meet, some blurred into one another, others in clear isolation.

Most of the paintings are very textured but not all. Some, like the delicate Bawdsey, pastel and charming watercolour December night, Farnham, reveal a very different aspect of Laurance's work. Others, like the superb San Stefanos, acrylic collage on paper; use small areas of texture only, collage rooftops, to draw attention to elements in the composition and create a contrast within it. Like Harbour Lights, Port Isaac, mixed media on paper, this is a painting that is full of motion. Areas of paint seem almost to skate over it's surface in swift darts of movement. Both paintings are remarkable compositions. Among the smaller works in the show Stone circle, Prescelli Hills, mixed media on paper, is among the most notable. Here the palette is limited, but the impact of the image is intense.

Martin Laurance is a Norfolk based artist. He trained at Ipswich School of Art, Norwich School of Art and the University of east Anglia. He's an exceptional, inspired and experimental painter who deserves our admiration. Go along and enjoy this stunning show.