About Martina
Martina Furlong was born in Co.Wexford, Ireland where she now resides after many years living in London, UK. She received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting from Limerick School of Art and Design in 1996.
She paints colourful, textured abstracts and landscapes mostly in oils but also uses acrylics and mixed media. They show her love of colour, shape, line and movement. While Martina's paintings are influenced by the things she sees and experiences daily, as a painting progresses her unconscious takes over and it becomes an organic, intuitive process.
In her work she likes to mix reality with memories, imagination and intuition and paint her own interpretation of it. She exaggerates colour, applies layer upon layer of paint, then works back into the surface with various tools as well as pallet knives and brushes to create sensuous works of art with a wonderful tactile quality.
Martina recently completed a new series of paintings for a solo exhibition at The Kenny Gallery, Galway in April 2022. This series was a continuation of her works inspired by her research into spiritual hunger, the mystery of being human, looking internally and connecting to nature. In February 2020 Martina finished a year long course in Embodied Mindfulness as part of that research. She explored these areas further in 2021 with courses on "The Tibetan Book Of The Dead" with Embodied Philosophy and "Awakening The Fearless Heart" with Tara Brach, facilitated by NICABM.
Her abstract landscapes are a metaphor for our internal landscape, the sacred place where we process all our daily thoughts, be they negative or positive. The use of dark and bright colours side by side reflects the quest to find a balance between the darkness and light within as we try to navigate our own unique world.
The paintings are built up layer by layer, overlapped, scraped back and drawn into using various tools, giving a sense of history to each piece.
Email:mfurlong17@googlemail.com