Martin Weinstein: Virtual Solo Exhibition

With so many variations of landscape painting created over several hundred years there remain fewer and fewer stones left to overturn. What Martin Weinstein has done with this most ubiquitous type is quite genius. By breaking his compositions down to three or four floating layers of painted elements, surfaces that can span days, months and even years, Weinstein has brought in a very specific element of time. And like the many landscape painters before him, Weinstein works all but the most frigid winter days on site and outdoors. While working, he might occasionally and subtly distort what he sees by bending a horizon line or tilting an axis here and there. However, for the most part, he paints what he sees in the land near and around the majestic Hudson River; the lush green fields and valleys that surround village of Trawden, England; and the Adriatic coastline of Venice, Italy, where the past collides with the traffic and rising seas of the present. 

Visually speaking, by overlapping layers of clear, frosted acrylic to paint upon, Weinstein can stretch the visual elements not just in time but in space, so a work will read differently in its level of abstraction from angle to angle and moment to moment. These shifting visual transitions are key to understanding the artist's work and how he uniquely references the land around him through a distinctive and varied filter. Each edge of a flower petal, every cluster or windswept leaf and each ray of sunlight can be elements that both blend and stand apart as nature observed travels through the air like a refreshing breeze or a sudden apparition.

In a way, this is more of how we actually see the world around us, how we focus and process information and how we judge perspective in movement from detail to detail and site to site. From his more visceral visions where a tilted horizon and the multiple measures of the distant mountains layered above sweeping abstraction, to the paths he paints that are bathed in sunlight, to the frailty of form of the slightest hint of delicateness or damage in the details of flowers there exists a peacefulness, a tranquility throughout Weinstein's many works, as he carefully captures a place where one can be whole, happy and a part of nature without the distractions of the day to day. It's just a matter of the will to wait and wonder.

 --D.Dominck Lombardi