Martin Blundell

Martin Blundell graduated the University of Utah with a BFA in Fine Art with an emphasis in printmaking and drawing. His recent work is focused on landscape paintings of western lands in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. These paintings explore the unique landforms and skyscapes of the high desert, mountain valleys, and rural places. The oil paintings are characterized by strong color supported by textured surfaces created with brush and pallet knife application. His paintings are in private, corporate, and university, and museum collections. He has received awards from the University of Utah, Utah Watercolor Society Utah Arts Council, Bountiful Davis Art Center, Springville Museum of Art, Utah Technical University Sears Museum, and is recognized in the University of Utah Marriott Library collection of Notable Utah Artists.

"I graduated with a degree in drawing and printmaking. I was making images that involved autobiographical information and references, random images collaged from memory and life. The work was personal and invited open ended interpretations. I began painting the landscape after years of traveling through the western United States and Canada. My paintings began to explore the unique land forms of the high desert, mountain valleys and rural places. This interest in the landscape is a chance to share the dramatic beauty of the land and sky, and to remember the feelings and emotion that accompany our interaction with it. The paintings have a graphic quality that I think is a tendency held over from my early printmaking work. I develop images with formal qualities ie: composition, complementary color relationships, aesthetic considerations, and the use of ambiguous mark making created through brush strokes and pallet knife applications. I describe my work as contemporary realism. I have retraced my travels many times, recapitulating memories and places. The remembering coupled with new opportunities to experience help me formulate enlarged connections to the landscape. Strong images have developed over the passage of time. I take photos for reference and make field drawings to adjust compositions, and finish most of my paintings in the studio. It seems incongruous that paintings don’t effortlessly become admired images. I have pondered the value of failure in success, and subsequently don’t give up on paintings. I have set aside paintings in resignation for months, then ultimately readdress them, scrape, sand, and over paint. Many times those that are lost are found and transform into my most meaningful paintings."

Martin Blundell