My memories of the ocean are the guiding mental images for my paintings. Through a prolonged process I build a moving field — waves that dance across a tactile surface. Composition is a foremost value in this work, circulating the eye through a space where figures and forms balance and counterbalance. I embrace the fluidity of form and colour to evoke a transcendence from the constraints of linguistic identity.

Painting is itself the exploration, improvisationally guiding the realization of the world. Rooted in an abstract ideology, the work reaches past the limits of language, inviting the viewer into physical impossibilities suspended in paint. Through the affects held in these paintings I attempt to perceptively enhance the reality in which we ourselves are suspended.

Martin Blake (b. 1987, Los Angeles) lives and works in Berlin. He received his MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, in 2015, and his BFA in Painting from Boston University in 2009. He has exhibited in Berlin, where he has been based since 2015.