Martin Weinstein: Moment to Moment

Martin Weinstein’s paintings are created on layers of transparent acrylic sheets. A single work is composed of several distinct views of the same location painted days, months, even years apart. A work can contain both morning and evening layers with starkly different light; it can combine unique weather events from different days or show variations in seasonal ripeness from year to year. Overlapping perspectives shift in relation to the viewer’s movement. Successive layers dance between blending and standing apart. 

Weinstein further complexifies the spatial arrangements with his choices—what to leave out or include, whether to bend a horizon line or tilt an axis to subtly distort the view—in the effort to conjure from the whole the richest expression he can. The final pieced composite defies a literal view of a single visible reality at a single moment in time and asserts the artist’s creative vision.

Martin Weinstein’s landscapes give us both the permission to delight in seeing the beauty of the natural world and the ability to see it more akin to how we actually experience it—as vibrant matter in flux, shifting in space and time, impermanent if not fleeting, but grounded and perennial. The paintings are imbued with the physics and feelings of time recollected, memory incarnate. Many paintings show views from Weinstein’s home, the home he grew up in and now shares with his wife and his brother’s family, a place invested with many decades of a family’s emotional relationship to time and place. The works are as much about human experience as they are about the beauty of the natural world. They resonate with the richness of memory and emotion invested in a natural setting, a beauty that extends beyond what the eyes can see.

Landscape painting is a tradition with rich variation over more than five centuries of history. Weinstein’s unique development in the genre is remarkable. He manages to show us something new in them, a new way of seeing our relationship to the land and nature, a new way of experiencing the timeless draw of their aesthetics and meaning. In painterly layers he captures both the land’s lyricism and mystery as well as the recurring drama of time filtered through our very human experience of it. He doesn’t just depict this beauty—he captures in poetic forms our relationship to that beauty and its deeper significance to us.