Martyn Cross

Martyn Cross paints in oil paint, oil pastel and charcoal, starting from sketches and drawings and building each canvas in slow, contemplative layers. He sands and scratches the surface back as he goes, and sometimes mixes sand into the paint, so the finished pictures look weathered and excavated, as if they carry a long history. Recognisable fragments of the world, limbs and landscape, turn into uncanny, biomorphic scenes of billowing clouds, cascading waterfalls, bright suns, eyes, flames and oversized pointing fingers. The imagery draws on medieval wall paintings, illuminated manuscripts and old English churches, on mythology and on science fiction, and the narratives stay deliberately ambiguous. Cross is drawn to the inner life and strangeness of the ordinary, and the paintings sit closer to found artefacts than to pictures of a particular moment.