Tony Martin

25cm x 25cm // 30cm x 42cm

I began this series of monotype drawings at the beginning of lockdown. The San Marco Annunciation by Fran Angelico intrigues me and in March I found myself studying reproductions of the painting. The monotype drawings are an attempt to present a relationship of mutual deference between two lines which represent Mary and the Angel. There is also a sense of light breaking through a dark space, as well as tenderness.

At a practical level, the pieces were made by drawing on paper laid upon an inked old marble chopping board, as if for monotype for example.

25cm x 25cm // 30cm x 42cm

Like the Dewfall is the title of a book collaboration with Irish poet John F. Deane. The sequence of poems is based upon Visions de l’Amen, a suite of seven pieces for two pianos by French composer Olivier Messiaen.

My thinking is around juxtaposition which characterises the music, (I think it was Boulez who said that Messiaen doesn’t compose but juxtaposes). Also, the juxtaposition in the poem of faith, life, personal development etc. The lines of the drawings are individual yet in an agreeable/amen relationship with each other. There’s also possible hints of the cross in the linear combinations, and perhaps an allusion to stained glass design. I want to serve the text without illustrating or distracting from it.

Original drawings measure 40cm x 40cm, ink on fabriano.

www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/john-f-deane

ink on fabriano

Kinsol Trestle, also known as the Koksilah River Bridge is on Vancouver Island, Canada. It is one of the tallest free standing trestles in the world. Work began in 1914 and the bridge was completed in 1920, the First World War halting the builders initial progress. The bridge is 187 metres long and 44 metres high, possesses a seven degree curve and is massive in size.

I viewed the bridge towards the end of 2017. It is a magnificent structure and often described as an ‘engineering marvel’. To stand on the bank of the river and glance up at stacked towers of angled weathered beams is to have a cathedral-like experience. The structure is marvellous and elegant, a giant runway of crosses and triangles emerging out of the wilderness:

Shall my soul meet

This curve, as a bend in the road

On her way to form

(Dag Hammarskjold)

Well, something greeted my soul on a crisp December morning in Canada: a few months into 2018 I found myself making drawings of vertical grids, tower-triangles in a criss-cross geometry...

ink on fabriano

Linear divisions developed after years of making drawings which retained the process of their making: lines drawn, redrawn, half obliterated, spaces reworked into something new. Accidental smudges and ghost marks, initial by-products of making, can eventually run the risk of morphing into a seductive style. 

Making lines and spaces with ink and ruler may appear an austere response, yet it has been a liberation :

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places, indeed I have a beautiful inheritance.  Psalm 16:6

The drawings often begin with certain self imposed rules that work in tandem with improvised decisions which in turn offer new possibilities. Rules such as the number of lines allowed in each square, one vertical or horizontal, begin at the left, right or centre, intersect or separate - a tightrope between invention and intention. And so the image develops as a record of an initial idea. There is also a nod to music and improvisation, the piano variations of Bach or Messiaen for example.

What seems like restriction gives way to the sheer pleasure of making an inky line, improvising a form, pushing a composition, or changing the sequence. My approach would be akin to the Sabbath poems of American poet Wendell Berry:

Enclosing the field within bounds

sets it apart from the boundless

of which, it was, and is, a part

and places it within care

the bounds of the field bind 

the mind to it.

The selected and re-formed spaces work in harmony with improvised boundaries that offer not restriction but new possibilities. The consideration of linear divisions and intervals provide an opportunity to reconsider ‘the boundless’.

conte on fabriano

Predannack: an airfield in Cornwall, operated by the RAF and somewhat associated with war and its corollaries. This appears incidental to Tony Martin’s suite of drawings, but it is the landscape associated with the area that has inspired the work. If the drawings suggest fields and fieldscapes, they may also suggest runways and landing strips. In our age and days, amidst the chaos and the turmoil, the noise and belligerence, against the weight on the human soul of the cluttering of images and voices raised in hatred and in anger, faced with the jingle-jangle of aggressive advertising – what may catch the heart off guard is simplicity, purity and minimalism. 

As in that wonderful poem by the late Seamus Heaney, “Postscript”, it is the common sight of swans on a lake that “catch the heart off guard and blow it open”. Heaney’s description of the swans resonates with the immediacy and directness of Martin’s drawings: “Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, / Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads / Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.” These are shapes and lines, white on white, purity and exactness emphasised. A fenced-in field of grass – without presence of human or beast or hoarding or shed – is a richly meaningful place, at peace in its being and purpose, and therefore we often pass it by without a second glance. It is being in itself, itself standing for itself. We accept it for what it is without trying to fill it in with anything that our contemporary need for usefulness and profit might demand. We do not need to ask – what is it? What’s it doing? What does it mean? We know. And we need only say – it is. And we are, in its presence. 

When I see Tony Martin’s drawings I think of the undertow, scales, linear up-and-down, over-and-back, cosmic geometry of all music. Bach, for instance: “that sheep may safely graze”. Or Palestrina, the heady counterpoint, as in sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum. There is, too, the immediacy of the joy presented by a snowdrop, the palm of an open hand, the road ahead laid out for a pilgrim trail. And as with a musical fugue, you arrive after your journey around Martin’s work, back where you began, knowing the clarity of line that can be resolved out of the blur of contemporary seeing. I relish Martin’s suite also as it appears to be an invitation to contemplation beyond the urges of the ego, even a call into the self-abandonment to the transcendental that is centering prayer.  That musical impressionist, Claude Debussy, once wrote: “Music is the arithmetic of sound as optics is the geometry of light”.  A pianist once described her playing of Chopin as a “compassionate geometry” as her fingers moved across the keys.  Let your eyes, then, rove over Martin’s drawings without presuppositions; let the lines, the space, flood your being with the silence and measure of their own, pure, being.

John F. Deane

In 1941 the artist Ben Nicholson spoke of abstract art being "an interplay of forces" - equally applicable, he felt, to football, tennis or the stars in the cosmos. Watching a skilled tennis player move in anticipation of the trajectory of a returned ball is to understand this "interplay of forces". So in Tony’s collages, the 'bounce' of the eye travels from red to blue via warm brown; from vibrancy to edge to darkness to transparency. We can engage with these works as we engage with a tennis or football match… or a game of chess …

or as we engage with a poem:

‘Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

  … 

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  … 

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;’

                                                                from: Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘Pied Beauty’

Tony’s knowledge and love of poetry underpins so much of what he makes.

Extracting (cutting out?) these lines from ‘Pied Beauty’ serves to describe his working process. Making collages requires a developed sense of touch - and dare I say 'caress'? The selection of humble papers; the shaping, placing, plotting adjusting, nudging "with swift, slow, sweet, sour; adazzle, dim".

… or as we engage with music:

“Well, shall we think or listen?

Is there a sound addressed not wholly to the ear?”

from: William Carlos Williams ‘The Orchestra’

The importance of structure in underpinning creativity is, in Bach-like manner, abundantly apparent in all Tony’s artwork, but most directly perhaps in his collages. We are invited to hear the melody beneath what we see. So: Shall we think or look? Is there a shape addressed not wholly to the eye?

Tony’s ‘visual language’ is not remote. The collages are to be enjoyed not as a challenge to be faced, but as a genuine encounter. Far from dry intellectual exercises these works are the result of annealed emotion. They are simply rich. The process of distilling, re-working, reducing, refining, in order to achieve a work of beauty and balance is Tony’s habitual approach. Look at the way each shape abuts its neighbour (does it touch, just?), or where a sliver of colour lies behind – a grace note …

These are clever works in that they appear easy to make. This is a quality that marks out art of substance - something Matisse taught us. We can feel assured by the confidence in Tony’s craftsmanship. The effort involved in the making remains unnoticed; we are invited to enjoy. Of course, in order to prevent us from becoming too cosy he builds in a degree of uneasiness, to keep us on our toes.

Vincent Stokes

conte on fabriano

The simplicity of Tony Martin's blue line drawings is deceptive. There's a depth to them too which only becomes apparent the more you're in their presence. At first, the creation of intriguing, irregular rectangles and triangles through blue lines which are never ruler-straight and often slightly smudgy might appear merely minimalist or naif. The drawings, for all their surprising serenity, might seem just like blockish puzzles. There's an honesty in the freehand lines, both a warmth and a transparency to the vernacular geometry, but it might have stopped there.

Like anything of great worth, though, the more time you put in, the more you get back. The drawings gently provoke you to rifle through your own memory-bank of images, reminding you here of an old envelope, maybe there of a squash court, a forgotten sugar-cube flat, or of tiles you once had. Sometimes the response is inexplicably emotional: a feeling of balance, of claustrophobia, or of nostalgia. You don't necessarily get the drawings, but they certainly get at you. 

As well as a stability, you start to sense in some of the drawings an exciting poise, as if the lines are teetering because the artist has played draughtsman's jenga, removing elements to see what happens to the tension and stability. You can still see the loving erasure of blue lines, faint reminiscences of what was once there, and you begin to feel that the whole solid thing in front of you might, at a breath, suddenly fall to the floor like leaves in autumn. 

Tony has spoken of the drawings as Chinese whispers, as evolutions of shapes. But where Chinese whispers embellish, it appears that the drawings pare back, seeking after a cleanliness, a purity even. It's not a spartan puritanism, but something more restful. There's a softness to the drawings which emerges from their almost dusty lines. I have a sense that you would sleep exceptionally well with one of these drawings in your bedroom. Like a great dream, they have both a peacefulness and a dynamism. 

Tony isn't, of course, the first artist to explore lines. Piet Mondrian's tableau and the De Stijl movement, or Eva Hesse's untitled gouaches, are possible ancestors to his abstraction. But what distinguishes his drawings is the spiritual depth which appears to inform his work. There's an echo of the Psalms in the sheer wonder one gets from the contemplation of the linear: “the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places.” It's common now to talk of “thin places” where the membrane between the human and the Divine appears, to some, particularly porous; but one gets the impression that Tony Martin's spacious generosity is more about a breadth: “he brought me out into a broad place; he rescued me, because he delighted in me.”

That appreciation of breadth may also be because Tony lives near the Somerset levels with their sometimes “prairie skies”. But the spaciousness of his work hints at an artistic humility which trusts that something greater will inhabit those broad spaces – perhaps the viewers' subconsciousness or something more numinous. That's why the simplicity seems to deepen, because the drawings become almost contemplative portals through which a sacred pilgrimage might begin.  

Tobias Jones

copper and aluminium plates

At school – probably in geography class – we had to draw room plans as though we were architects. We would first draw a square, which represented the external wall, the range of our homes. To this square we would add lines to signal windows and doors. A rectangle would represent a bed or a sofa. The line that signalled the door would begin from the larger square and would point inwards, roughly 45 degrees from the base line, to show which way it opened. Or maybe the line began in the space and reached out for the wall. Either way, it was a level of abstraction that was both intoxicating and uncomfortable. 

      There is something reminiscent of this particular abstraction in the etchings of Tony Martin’s Open Field; etchings which seem at once familiar and disrupted, abstract and intimate. 

      The title of the collection itself encourages a variety of interpretations. Open Field. We might think of a field on a farm, for instance, which offers another kind of contained space. In this interpretation the viewer remains abstracted in the same way as they were over the room plan in my geography class, as though hovering above the fields. From our vantage point, we see the echoes of older field systems, the grime of many churning feet, desire paths across the page.

      There is also the sense of ‘field’ as the word might be used in physics, defined in a pertinent way by one dictionary as ‘the region in which a particular condition prevails, especially one in which a force or influence is effective regardless of the presence or absence of a material medium.’ It is at this point that we might be reminded of Tony Martin’s faith and his love of poetry. 

      TS Eliot’s ‘East Coker’, from Four Quartets, was an influence on this sequence of etchings, and there again we find the ‘open field’, a phrase repeated throughout the piece:

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

‘Houses rise and fall’. ‘Houses live and die’. ‘The houses are all gone under the sea.’ The open field stretches where the houses once stood, and ‘In that open field / If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close’, you can hear the music and the dance of ‘those long since under earth’. In the etchings, the dynamic absence of these hauntings is suggested in the shadows and spots, the vestigial forms and scuffed shapes.

      There remain a number of sharper shapes and more strongly suggested moods and figures: a bare tree reduced to a gesture; a coastline; an obliterating storm. Marks of what is there, as well as the residue of what is no longer there. These qualities have intrigued me since I was first made aware of Tony’s work, several years ago.

      Our connection was poetry. At the time, I was writing about the poet Jack Clemo, whose awkward verse and native rural-industrial landscape also intrigued Tony, to such an extent that he made a series of works in response. Tony’s etchings, sketches and paintings were as sharp and stark as Clemo’s early faith, as arresting as the smashed landscape of the china clay mining region of Clemo’s Cornwall. I thought of it as a sensitive, abstract kind of lyricism. 

      The etchings of Open Field are a part of that same lyricism and minimalism. They suggest a quiet, meditative sort of intensity, the eternal implied in simple marks, shadows and interrupted spaces. 

Luke Thompson