Leaves of the Brush – Martin Claydon

Leaves of the Brush from Martin Claydon investigates the act of painting itself. This inquiry mounts a response to questions of what painting can offer the experience of the modern world. Claydon's formidable composition of figurative imagery depicts the capacity of a painting, contrasting both its glory and its limits. 

A devotion to the purity of painting is surrendered in the pursuit of reflecting the sheer mass of our cultural terrain. Colloquial forms are shaped around routine and banal objects in eccentric cubist renderings. A mode of debased language, compressed forms and an overload of information. Claydon's texture and brushwork suggest an attempt to contain an overwhelm within the works; both painter and canvas together besieged by the modern world. This fraught dynamic is expressed in pressured forms fighting for the eyes of the viewer. One can detect a repeated act of painting over and a landscape of elements below the surface or in the past, a process of severance from events, the painting gesturing beyond itself.

Martin Claydon was born in London in 1989 and is currently based in Crescent Head. He has a degree in Fine Art (Painting) from the National Art School, Sydney and also studied at Middlesex University. London. He was the recipient of the Lloyd Rees Memorial Art Prize (2015) and a finalist in both the Brett Whiteley Traveling Art Scholarship and the Black Swan Portrait Prize (2018). In 2024 Martin received the Lane Cove Hyecorp Property Prize. His work is held in public and private collections in both England and Australia, including the Sydney Town Hall archive, Lane Cove Council Chambers and Redlands Art Gallery.