Martyn Brown

Making art is an enduring passion in my life, one of my earliest memories and a continual process of challenge and discovery, frustration and absorption. I work in different media – pencil, charcoal, ink, watercolour and oil and experiment with print making and frottage. Recurring themes in my work are memories, significant places and people – traces and marks left behind, either in reality (frottage) or in my head.

The challenge of representation expressed through strokes of a brush fascinates me, alongside the disintegration of the image in close up. The images I select start with my personal and visual response often to daily life – and sometimes initially captured in my diary/sketchbooks; friends, family, the garden, Dartmoor and the sea feature strongly.

Recent work has focused on Dartmoor stone - individual stones from particular places, walls, tors. I have made 'visual diaries' in more than 40 'moleskin' notebooks (mostly 14 x 7 cms) to document my life (from 2005 to date), including Covid, lockdowns, hip replacement, and holidays. Sketches of the Lower Otter Valley from 2021 to 2023 depict the 'restoration' project, abstraction of the valley as 'horizons' - and culminating in an oil painting of Otter Head (based on Paul Nash's 'The Menin Road' 1917) exhibited in Budleigh Salterton through 2022 and 2023.

I am interested in collaborative work with other artists and in community creative projects - I have organised The Big Draw events, mail-art programmes and numerous exhibitions both of my own work and that of other artists. Recent projects have included co-curating an exhibition of the work of Joyce Dennys and presenting her work as prints on deckchairs for Fairlynch Museum and Arts Centre.

Martyn Brown's CV

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