Martine Johanna’s women portraits have a larger than life quality to them. A mixture of figurative and abstract elements, they’re colored as though they’re lit from within, using a visually stimulating prismatic palette. According to Johanna, these colors are a reference to primary impulses, the color spectrum of toys, flowers, and optimism.
“The figures are fictitious women, reconstructed models from my own photography,” explained the painter in an interview with Metal Magazine. According to Johanna, more often than not, these women tend to resemble her.
“Through them, I process my own circumstances, as they mainly are the heroines of my storylines translated from reality to imagination,” she explains.
Born and raised in Gelderland, the Netherlands, Johanna studied at ArtEZ, the Academy of Fine Arts in Arnhem, obtaining a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree. Since graduating, she has exhibited in multiple solo shows in the Netherlands, Europe, and the United States.
“I started out drawing and when I felt I needed color and size, I slowly switched to painting,” she reflects. “Those are my main outlets but I also love music, dancing, film, architecture, and interior design; also, clothing (in its least commercial form) fascinates me.” Indeed, her work seems to echo her love of fashion and art, in its many shapes and forms.
Johanna explains that her unique painting technique has developed autonomously and consists of a multitude of small paint strokes in unmixed colors. While her paintings seem realistic from afar, there’s a tension between reality and fantasy that lies just beneath the surface, and which becomes visible the closer you get.
The end result evokes a dreamlike state, which is both alluring and frightening: “When I work,” says Johanna, “I don’t consciously involve the spectator in my decision-making. I intuitively balance and process my own way of working, including in the storytelling aspects. So these are inherently my own types of female.”
