Luke Martineau - From Thames to Tiber

Paris in March is bitterly cold at times but it's amazing what you can tolerate once smothered in several highly unfashionable clothes and accessories. Those fingerless gloves may be held together with masking tape but they certainly get the job done. Paris is a strange place to be at the moment, every second person in uniform and armed. But it is still astonishingly beautiful and offers artistic possibility with every boulevard and bridge. What a joy it is to spend time searching out the best views - in Paris, as in Venice, there is an embarrassment of riches. I know it’s not high-brow, but all I really want to do is to celebrate this, to express very simply the joy of looking and the pleasure of putting things down in paint.

This exhibition is the product of over a year’s work, bookended by trips with the Chelsea Art Society to Venice in March 2015 and to Paris six weeks ago. I have really enjoyed working alongside my fellow Chelsea artists. There is much camaraderie on these trips but also a degree of competitiveness. You haven’t really cut your teeth as a landscape painter until you have been woken in the pre-dawn by the clink of easels being made ready for action. The discipline of working alongside like-minded artists is a good reminder of the shared language which representational painters have to learn and try to extend, and this language is also a way of developing a conversation that looks forwards and backwards through time. Whilst in Paris I spent a happy morning in the Musee D’Orsay, meandering through those Impressionist rooms with all the fabulous images that were so important to me when I embarked on my journey as an artist. Among those pictures, I found a Sisley painted from a spot on the Ile de la Cite which I knew well from having included it in my picture painted from the Pont des Arts the day before- and there in Sisley’s painting was the precise spot on that bridge where you see me painting in the picture opposite. I am proud to work in this tradition of painting from the subject- despite the weather.

And what of Rome, and the ‘From Thames to Tiber’ theme? Well, the title is chosen more for alliterative potential than for the volume of the work produced in Rome on a flying half term visit last October. And you will note that the Tiber barely features at all in the exhibition as a whole. But there is an emotional sense for me in which this show is born out of my early travels after leaving school to the various staging posts of the 18th Century Grand Tour, and if there is anything significant to be said about the work I have done then it is that I love these places and consider myself lucky to be able to paint them year after year. London, Paris, Venice, Meribel, Rome, North Devon...it doesn’t sound like real work does it? But at the time of writing this, having packaged up and delivered 80 paintings to the gallery, I certainly feel as though the last 18 months have amounted to that and a lot more, and I have no regrets about it at all!

Luke Martineau

April 2016