Draft:Paul Martin

British artist From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Paul Martin (1948 – 2022) was a British painter and printmaker known for his encaustic paintings exploring themes of nature, spirituality, myth, and landscape. His work is held in the collections of the Royal Academy, the British Museum, and the BBC,[1][2][3] as well as the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum.[4]

Early life and education

Martin was born in Bournemouth in 1948, the son of Alice (nee Moland), a secretary, and John Martin, a hydro-electric engineer, who died when Paul was ten.[1] He grew up in Rugby, where he attended Dunsmore School.[1] He excelled at sport, representing Warwickshire at rugby and swimming, and leading a national schoolboy gymnastics team on a tour of Austria in 1964.[2][1] While still at school, he played drums in an early incarnation of the Rugby-based pop band Pinkerton's Assorted Colours; he had left the group before they scored a UK top-ten hit with "Mirror, Mirror" in 1966.[1]

Martin studied painting at Birmingham School of Art in the late 1960s and subsequently at the Royal Academy Schools in the early 1970s.[1][2][5] Birmingham was then dominated by Abstract Expressionism, while the Royal Academy focused on traditional life-drawing. Martin found neither approach entirely congenial, later describing those years as ones of "productive disagreement".[2] In 1968, during his time at Birmingham, he met the art historian and theologian H. R. Rookmaaker, who influenced his thinking about the relationship between faith and art.[5]

Career

Teaching

After leaving the Royal Academy, Martin settled in St Albans and taught part-time at several schools and art colleges.[2] He subsequently became art master at Rugby School, where he taught for approximately twenty years and was universally known as "Doc Martin".[1][2] He was regarded as a talented and inspiring teacher, and many of his students went on to become artists.[2] After retiring from Rugby, he was recruited to Scotland by Philip Archer, the long-time principal of Leith School of Art in Edinburgh, who had been a former protege.[6] Martin taught at Leith for over two decades as a lecturer and tutor.[6][7][8] After retiring, he returned to the school to teach on a continuing professional development programme.[8]

Artistic practice

Martin's early paintings were large, often semi-narrative works with themes and figures drawn from the Bible, ancient mythology, and contemporary life.[2] His figurative works of the 1990s featured stylised, iconic figures with realistic faces, drawing on subjects such as the Ship of Life and the Ship of Fools from medieval allegory.[5]

A central feature of his technique was his use of encaustic painting, an ancient method involving hot beeswax and ground pigments. He expanded this to incorporate sand, grit, ash, resins, bitumen, magnesium oxide, and other organic materials, creating densely layered and textured surfaces.[2][3][9]

Martin's Christian faith, which evolved from an Evangelical Baptist upbringing to membership of the Eastern Orthodox Church, significantly informed his work.[2] He took up icon writing and the creation of altarpieces, aspects of which influenced the style and content of his paintings.[2] Examples of his icon writing and altarpiece work can be seen in the Church of the Ascension in Rugby, St Luke's in London, and St Gabriel's in Glasgow.[7] His intellectual influences included the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.[2] The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins provided him with key concepts such as "inscape".[10]

In the final decade or so of his career, Martin's work underwent a major shift. The human figure disappeared from his paintings, which became intensely focused on the physical landscape.[1][2] He rejected picturesque or scenic approaches, instead creating works that incorporated small found objects and fragments of beach glass, sand, and ash, producing densely textured surfaces.[2] In the period before his death, figures had begun tentatively to re-enter his work.[1][2]

Exhibitions

Martin exhibited widely in the United Kingdom and internationally, including in France, the Netherlands, and Australia.[6] Over a seventeen-year period he was featured in at least ten exhibitions in Edinburgh alone.[6] Notable exhibitions included:

  • Through a Glass Darkly, Henderson Gallery, Edinburgh (2009)[9]
  • When Men and Mountains Meet, Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, and Summerhall, Edinburgh (2014)[3][11]
  • Landscapes Inscapes (with Idris Murphy), Sydney, Australia (2014)[10]
  • Edgelands (with Idris Murphy), Warburton Gallery, Edinburgh (2014-15)[10][12]
  • Seawrack Rising, Warburton Gallery, Edinburgh (2015)[13]
  • Where Echoes Rest (posthumous retrospective), Dalkeith Palace, Midlothian (2025)[6][7]

The posthumous retrospective at Dalkeith Palace, organised by Martin's family, comprised more than 180 works spanning painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation, and was the first solo exhibition to be hosted at the palace, which dates to 1702.[6]

He was represented by Bourne Fine Art (later The Fine Art Society) in Edinburgh, which published several exhibition catalogues of his work.[14]

Awards

Over the course of his career, Martin received several awards including the British Institution Prize for Printmaking and the Royal Academy Award for Drawing and Painting.[7][3]

Personal life

Martin died of pancreatic cancer in early 2022, aged 73, and was survived by his wife and sons.[1][8] His funeral was held as a Requiem Mass at Old Saint Paul's Scottish Episcopal Church, Edinburgh.[8]

References

External links

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