Through the way that I process the image the technology I’ve used, it eliminates certain elements or information, which is out of my control. “There is a certain part where I like to hand it over to the machinery and let it throw up mistakes.

So that became an essential point for the work.” A lot of the time, colours are completely misread and information is shifted. “It didn’t know how to translate digital information using something like oil paint and there were always stoppages and breakages. But what I enjoyed about the machine is that, in itself, it contained glitches. “Painting has always been associated with the individual and with hand marks, which the machine has never been located in, so I thought it was quite a bizarre, almost absurd project. Martin enjoys the inconsistencies it produces. Taking found images from seed packets, magazines and photographs, Martin has created the large canvases using a machine that prints with oil paint. Obviously, they reference flowers, but that’s more in the way that, in the context of the history of painting or photography, flowers are quite a clichéd subject.” In fact, in most of these cases, I don’t know what these flowers are. “I’m not interested in flowers in terms of their symbolic value.

“I think that they almost become fields,” he says. But even a room full of floral prints can push the boundaries of the painterly process, leading him into the parallel realms of photography and experimental music.įor Martin, images of flowers are so generic and ubiquitous they allow the viewer to see beyond the actual imagery. Where and when: Jensen Gallery, 61 Upper Queen Street, Newton until the end of AugustĪuckland painter Leigh Martin’s latest exhibition Noise may seem a radical departure from the spare abstraction of his previous work. A slightly abbreviated version of the following article first appeared in the NZ Herald on July 21, 2004.Īndrew Clifford talks to painter Leigh Martin about the ideas germinating his flower images.

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