Martin Harris is a landscape painter whose particular interests include capturing the effects of natural and artificial light, and the challenge of describing the three dimensional nature of distance and perspective on a two dimensional surface.
He grew up and lived most of his life in Carshalton, Surrey on the edge of London, and was very fortunate to attend a school with an outstanding art department. Following this, he trained as an industrial designer, but very quickly moved into the music business, eventually becoming a luthier with a workshop in Ewell and then Carshalton.
In 1986 he again enrolled at an art college, this time to retrain as a model maker. A thirty year career followed working with a number of London architects, producing hundreds of models of buildings, interiors, urban planning and landscapes. He was also for a time an external lecturer in model making at the University of Hertfordshire.
He retired in 2016, but had begun to paint in earnest some seventeen years earlier, initially joining classes at his local adult education centre in Sutton, where he met his partner, fellow painter Angela Barry. They moved to South Somerset in 2017.
He has exhibited in London, Surrey, Hertfordshire, Cornwall and Somerset and retains a strong interest in music and architecture.