Jason Martin

Jason Martin - Studies in London, first exhibition successes 

Jason Martin was born on Jersey on 8 September 1970. His early awakened interest in art led him at the age of 18 to London to the Chelsea School of Art which he visited for almost a year. In 1990, he enrolled at Goldsmiths College which at that time was a coveted gathering place for the Young British Artists. He graduated with a Bachelor in 1993 and attracted so much attention with his early work that he was awarded a scholarship from the Sohen Ryu Tea Ceremony Foundation in Kamakura, Japan in 1995. It was to be the beginning of a successful, densely packed exhibition phase: In the following years, Martin was among the participants of such groundbreaking art events as the show Real Art. A New Modernism. British Reflexive Painters in the 1990s at Southampton City Art Gallery, where he established himself as an important protagonist of the emerging new art movements.

Energetic brushwork provides structure

Jason Martin drew a great deal of inspiration from post-war Abstract Expressionism. Despite all the similarities and affinities, he quickly developed his own characteristic style. He became famous above all for his completely monochrome paintings which attain spatial depth, however, through the selected structure of the paint application. Informed observers would like to see a resemblance to Action Painting in Jason Martin’s painting style, but unlike the famous representatives of this style such as Jackson Pollock, Martin does not allow any loss of control: The artist is always simultaneously slave and master of the art, the paint does not drip by chance wildly onto the canvas, but is applied consciously and with intent. Whole layers of oil or acrylic paint are applied over a solid surface of Plexiglas, aluminium or stainless steel. The determined, powerfully executed movement of the brush lends the picture character and structure – for all its associations, a clear and deliberate difference to the arbitrary-chaotic Action Painting. 

A self-made comb as a creative tool

As an artist, Jason Martin has consciously chosen a reduction of means in order to achieve the desired effect with his work. It is about a space of intimacy that should unite the artwork and the viewer. In doing so, the brush frequently becomes a comb: for each of his paintings, often kept in a single bright colour, Jason Martin constructs a special comb with which he distributes the paint mass, giving it furrows and mounds, forming, in a sense, an artistic landscape. The exceptionally vivid overall impression of colour, light and shade accounts for a large part of the immense fascination with Jason Martin’s work. 

Jason Martin lives and works alternately in London and Melides in Portugal.