Melissa Faithful for Art-Sheep
Germany-based artist Susannah Martin‘s paintings date back to the prehistoric ages!
Well, although they weren’t actually painted back when dinosaurs existed, Martin’s depicts her subjects naked, in a primitivistic natural environment. In these oil paintings we find nude people exploring their surrounding, interacting with one another and encountering wild life. These figures look like they have been lost, forgotten in time and space, with their nudity not being sexually-charged, but simply natural. This characteristic highlights how nature has become something estranged to people who seem to be more familiar with technology and disconnected from nature.
“Nature is no longer home to us, she is much more a tourist destination. Certainly no representation of the nude in landscape in the 21st century can escape conveying our extreme estrangement from nature, intentional or not. There is an unavoidable strangeness or feeling of dislocation which envelopes the most sincere attempt at harmony. How absurd man seems stripped of his possessions and identity crutches and yet it is indisputable, he gains strength, clarity and beauty when we contemplate him abstractly , as a phenomenon of nature. My experimentation with contemporising the nude in landscape takes place within this framework of tension between these two poles of self-perception,” the artist writes in her sttatement.
