Martin Grover

Martin Grover works from life, sketches, memories and photographs. His work adheres to the painting tradition with its emphasis on capturing the commonplace. Martin constructs and composes little scenes and incidents from the passing world. This narrative illustrative thread has led him to ponder on and draw from an eclectic range of subjects. Events half remembered and half forgotten, portrayals of a childhood quarrel over the colour of grass and other seminal childhood episodes, radio stories, traffic bulletins, ‘in brief’’ newspaper articles, casualty waiting rooms, involuntary waving illness, abandoned and derelict houses, John Betjeman poems, a Graham Green short story, buses, bus stops, trains, road signs, Brockwell Park, his children's various hospital appointments and tests, the allure of sheds and shelters, Ladybird books, the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life and more are distilled to create an ephemeral world of curious and humorous daydreams that sometimes reveal a more haunting and melancholic heart.