Martin Herbert lives and works in Llanidloes, Powys, mid-Wales. His work, both digital and in oil & egg-tempera (Mische Technique), draws on archetypes and mythic symbology from many cultures. He is a member of the Society for Art of Imagination and a founder of the British Visionary Artists' Group. Martin: "I've always painted. At school, although my main focus was on the sciences, I insisted on taking art as well, even though it meant doing classes at lunchtime. After leaving it paid my beer money through college, selling in the Sunday morning art market under Elvet Bridge in Durham.

"How Turtle Knows which Way to Go" : Digital Painting : 2004

"After college I joined the British Antarctic Survey - 2 years in the great white wastes counting penguins and tracking weather balloons. I think that experience reinforced a liking for wide and wild landscapes that I'm rediscovering in some of the animal totem series. On the way home I hitched a lift on HMS Endurance to South America where I spent a while bumming around. I've always done some travelling from time to time and in 1999 put my 'career' in software engineering on hold and traveled around the world for a year. I achieved my first boyhood ambition, which was to visit all the continents on the globe. I'm glad I got the hard one - Antarctica - out of the way first!

"I've always been involved in music as well as art. A couple of years ago I had a six-string electric fiddle made and I've just put together a little studio where I'm currently using it on, well… kind of ethereal subliminal Celtic sound-scapes over natural 'collected' sounds, which seem to complement the paintings I'm doing at the moment. Whilst travelling I made quite a collection of instruments, which I'm still trying to find time to play, including oud, sarangi, ravanhatta, harp, and dijeridu.

"Back in the UK in 2000, I was determined to make a career break and start painting professionally. I moved to Wales, working part-time in the computer industry to pay the bills while building up the art business. At that time I got into digital artwork using a combination of several different software packages. There's still a surprising amount of prejudice in the art world about computers - for some reason people seem to think it only took a couple of hours, and hey! - the computer did most of it for you anyway! I know of some computer artists who take 8 or 9 months to produce a work, and whilst it's possible to produce superficially attractive artwork using 'cut & paste' techniques on a computer, the end result depends on the talent, vision, and technique of the artist just as much as it does with traditional media. No one thinks writers are 'cheating' if they use a word processor instead of a pen, and practically all the music we hear today is made on a computer, not a tape recorder, but for some reason digital artwork is still regarded as inferior. I tell people the computer is just a different kind of paintbrush, in the same way it's just a different kind of pen. Generally, a digital painting takes me about 3 weeks.

"In 2003 I decided I could afford to take a bit of time to work more in traditional media again. I got a loan from the Arts Council of Wales, loaded up my credit card, and flew to Vienna, joining half a dozen other artists from all over the world. We spent 3 weeks in Ernst Fuchs' villa in the South of France and in Austria learning his 'Mische' (mixed media) technique. This old master technique, used by the Van-Eyck brothers, Parmigianino, and many others and redeveloped by Fuchs in the 1950's, involves painting in a series of alternating layers of oil glazes and white egg-tempera, gradually building up semi-transparent rainbow tinted shadows which form the basis for light and dark in the final painting. I learned more about painting in those 3 weeks than in the rest of my life. I'm still digesting that and putting it into practice, having to adapt some of his recipes for media etc. - it's fine working at Ernst's studio on the Mediterranean - you just put the picture out on the terrace and it's dry in a couple of hours. In cold damp Wales it can take days, so I work on at least three or four paintings at once. I'm now gradually building up enough originals for a show. One of the most difficult things, as ever, is deciding when to stop. New York artist Linda Chido quoted Salvador Dali to me - someone asked him how he knew when a painting was finished. His reply - "When it's sold and paid for!" I'm with him on that one.

"Artistically, I've many influences - Burne-Jones, Maxfield Parrish, Giger, Roger Dean, Yves Tanguy, Cranach the Younger, Caspar David Friedrich… too many to list. If they have anything in common, it's an unearthly quality to the light in their paintings. Friedrich, in particular - often his subject is quite ordinary, but there is a quality to the composition and light that hints at deeper meaning. One consistent theme in my work has been my attempt to inject a sense of spirituality without including too much in the way of specific symbolism. My own spiritual roots are an eclectic mixture of shamanism, druidry, etc. absorbed via osmosis over the years. I've a great interest in mythology and have tried to go to original source material wherever possible. That background, together with Celtic fantasy writers like Robert Holdstock and Charles de Lindt, has had more influence on my painting than anything else. My aim is to produce images that aren't just decorative, or literal referrals to mythology, but resonate with the viewer on a more visceral level. What I'm trying to achieve, I think, is an image that has an air of familiarity that the viewer can't quite pin down - the feeling I get from Holdstock's writing. I want people to say - "I think I've seen that somewhere before, but I just can't think where…" I must be doing something right, since that's often the reaction I get.

"Some of the most popular works I've done in this vein are the "5 Elements" series. People seem to relate to these images on a sub-conscious level, and often find themselves particularly drawn to one particular image without knowing why. The work I'm doing at the moment, mainly based on 'power' or 'totem' animal images prominent in Celtic mythology - stag, hare, boar, wren, etc, seems to resonate in a similar way. As with my music, I often work in a semi-meditative state - I'm not deliberately trying to connect with the subconscious, but it seems to happen... My latest works in progress, a series of 'dragon' pictures, are all done without preparatory drawings, the tempera going straight onto the canvas in a more expressionist way. They're not your standard 'sword & sorcery' dragons, but 'genius loci' - spirits of place, embedded in rock or water forms.

"Commercially, there have been two important developments in the last year or so. Firstly I invested in a professional wide format giclée printer for my own prints. Secondly, I opened a small studio/gallery here in Llanidloes, and started a grass-roots cooperative with other local artists & galleries to market our work collectively. My main aim for 2005 is to find good gallery representation both in the UK and USA - then I'll be well on the way to achieving another lifelong ambition - devoting myself full-time to painting".

(A modified version of this article appeared in "Inscape", the magazine of the Society for Art of the Imagination, in May 2005)