ABOUT MARTYN LACEY & HIS WORK

BIO

Martyn Lacey was born in 1956 in the Midlands of England. From a very early age he had an interest in drawing and painting. While still at school he had a weekend job at a sign writers and also made money by painting the leather jackets of the local Hells Angels. After leaving school at the age of fifteen with no qualifications, and failing to gain admittance to the local art college because of his young age and, a lack of qualification, he started to lose direction.  He eventually succeeded in gaining a Degree in Graphic design from BCAD. Not feeling comfortable with the commercial world of design and advertising he spent some time as a free lance illustrator. In 1989 he moved to Oxford to take up a position as an art technician in the art department of an Oxford college. . During the mid 1980s he had worked as a volunteer using his art skills with the Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign, opposing the brutal American aggression on the tiny Central American country. When the war in Yugoslavia erupted in 1991 he decided to try and do something positive to help. Funding his own work he went to work in a refugee camp on the Bosnian Croatian border. Taking his own equipment and materials he worked with a Bosnian refugee teacher taking art activities with Bosnian children. Extremely unsettled by what he saw and heard in the camp he returned to see friends in the heavily shelled and almost surrounded Bosnian town of Bosanski Brod. There he joined the new and disorganized army of the Bosnian-Croats. After two months he returned to England to settle up his affairs and return to Bosnia. In the meantime the town of Bosanski Brod was over run by the Serbs. After attempts to return with various aid organizations failed, and feeling unsettled with western society he packed up and flew to Uganda in Africa where he had a contact in the refugee camps on the Ugandan / Sudan border. He returned to England a few months later to wait for a contract in a new refugee camp, which never came. Since th.

PAINTINGS#SUBJECT MATTER

Martyn Lacey's life has probably been the most influential factor in the subject matter of his artwork. The theme of mans insatiable greed, the suffering, and disregard for human life feature strongly. For him personally, art should not only be used to bring pleasure but it should also be used to unveil the hidden and unspoken truths that hide below the surface of manipulated language. Art should be able to cry out in the unspoken and mostly unheard pain of the millions who suffer on the face of this so called "civilized" planet. It is sad that modern Western dream world society has conspired to cut out the "cancer" of pain and suffering that is so natural to this world. By doing so it has actually desensitised and trivialised an important part of mans existence. Pain and suffering are now something to be watched on the medium of entertaining news shows. It is as though we subconsciously yearn for something we have lost. In the most terrible of places and in the depths of human suffering can be found understanding of self and others that is hard to find in the fatuous and whimsical societies of the west. There is nothing wrong with pleasure, there must be an equilibrium, things start to go wrong when everything is sacrificed upon the alter of pleasure in the false and engineered pursuit of never-ending "happiness" which, is also one of the false engines of greed and capitalism.

THE MEDIUM

Over the last fifteen years Martyn has mainly used soft pastels on Ingre paper. Collage can also be found in some works although these tend to be of an earlier period. The main influence for the collage is his training in the medium of photography which was part of his degree course. For the last few years Martyn has been working in Stained Glass. When time permits he will start to convert some of his paintings to Stained Glass. A medium that lends itself to some of his later work which explores geometric designs using Acrylic Paint for conversion into Stained glass.