Featured Artist - Mark Payne

Salmon Galleries is proud to present Heartfelt by Mark Payne.

Exhibition dates: 10th to 27th November, 2005

Please scroll down for detailed images.

My heart shall be the faithful compass that still points to thee.
                                                                        (John Gay 1685-1732)

Payne devotes the first half of the exhibition to a gentle exposition of man’s dislocation from Nature: of our unwillingness to be totally alive to beauty for its own sake. The juxtaposition of a tiny human figure reading a newspaper in the face of nature’s soaring majesty creates a compelling arena for crucial self-reflection. Payne’s commentary on our contemporary life style is all the more powerful for its wit and subtlety. If it weren’t for the wondrous beauty of these paintings, the viewer might mistake censure for despair.

In the second half of the exhibition, the artist offers hope and the key to personal fulfilment. Returning to a motif he employed in Heart Lands (2004), Payne again sets his characters in vast, prodigious landscapes. This time, hope rests in our acknowledging nature as the ‘faithful compass’ to personal fulfilment. The symbolic red heart of the Heart Lands series is replaced with a heart embedded in nature. In The leap of faith for instance, the crevice of the rock formation over which the tiny human figure leaps contains the shape of a heart. When we see and feel that connection with nature, wondrous things can happen.

Painted in a pointillist, impressionistic style, these paintings are to be enjoyed for their artistic technique as well as their subject matter. Payne applies his paint in careful layers of interwoven and overlapping brush strokes. His soft and delicate technique echoes the gentle nurturing possibilities of nature. He excels in his portrayal of clouds and the light spaces of shimmering air between them. Air has never looked so beautiful and so meaningful.

In Heartfelt, Payne replaces innocence with a gentle sense of urgency about the need for us reconnect with ourselves, each other and the natural world we inhabit.

For further information, please enquire at Salmon Galleries.