A GATHERER OF SPARKS
BY GREGOR SLOSS
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A canvas is studded with pure colour, with red and black and gold leaf. Two faces emerge, their eyes large and filled with wisdom, eyes which have seen much and are yet untroubled, their gaze steady and serene. Bearded like prophets or patriarchs, they regard us like carved stone corbels looking down from on high in a mediaeval church, and just as those carvings, however brilliant their execution, remain but a part of the fabric of their building, so these faces do not seek to separate or dominate, but remain embedded, a part of the whole. On their heads birds perch, unafraid.
For those familiar with the trajectory of Paul Martin’s career, the most striking thing about his final paintings is surely the return of the human figure, something that had all but disappeared from his work when he was occupied with what he called his ‘Concretions’, his investigations of the nature of nature and the meaning of landscape. The figures are recognisably Martin’s: large eyes gazing out at the viewer from long oval faces, elongated bodies and fingers, the fingers making mysterious, unreadable but seemingly meaningful gestures. At the same time they are different, their outlines fuzzy rather than firm. They do not dominate or assert mastery over their surroundings, but rather seem caught at the point of emerging from or merging with them. Gone are the richly decorated interiors that once typified Martin’s work and instead the figures have moved outdoors to become part of the landscape. This is not the illusionistic landscape of Martin’s student days, but nor is it the landscape of the Concretions: the landscape of these final paintings is readable and recognisable. Under the intense concentration, the intense focus on individual aspects of river and rock, shoreline and forest, the landscapes of the Concretions seemed to unfold or decompose themselves in a way that, some have suggested, pushed the work close to abstraction. This, whether true or not, is a remarkable claim as Martin’s career was rooted in his relationship with and resistance to the abstract.
The Birmingham School of Art at which Martin began his studies was a hotbed of Abstract Expressionism which saw no place for figurative painting. Martin, whose work was at that time heavily influenced by the masters of the Dutch Golden Age, had little in common with this approach, though he admired his tutors for their dedication and serious purpose and relished the chance to argue and debate with them. Though these discussions were held on a technical and theoretical level, the grounds for Martin’s objections to the prevailing ethos were far more basic: abstraction simply ‘didn’t fit what I thought I believed about the world'. After Birmingham, Martin undertook postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy, a course largely focused on life-drawing. While this was in many ways a positive experience he eventually became dissatisfied with the work he was making, saying later that he felt it had become ‘very reactionary', and at this point Martin turned to still life, his first abandonment of the human figure. If the Concretions were an examination of the nature of nature, his work at this period was more concerned with the nature of things, the everyday, the overlooked and unconsidered. Some of these works do, in John Berger’s phrase, ‘burrow beneath the apparent': the gloves in The Press, for example, metonymically evoke the hands that might inhabit them; they are at one and the same time the hands that are our way of sensing the world around us and a barrier between the self and that outer reality. The hands, too, are the vital tools of the artist. Broken Cisterns is even more uncompromising in its mundanity, and far less referentially rich, and it is difficult to discuss other than in terms of its treatment of form and mass and volume. It might seem a small step from this to abstraction, to work that deals with these qualities unmoored from any representational content, but so powerful is the presence of these cisterns in all their stained and rusted unloveliness that this is a step we do not take. Broken Cisterns is deeply imbued with what Paul Martin called ‘the gritty sacredness of things’, their ‘thisness’. A key concept for Martin, ‘thisness’ does not concern the truth of an object’s doing, but of its particular being; it does not speak of a table, but this table, right here, right now. The word translates the ‘haecceity' of the Scholastics, followers of Duns Scotus, but it also contains elements of what philosophers call ‘qualia’, the inherent and irreducible redness of red, for example, that which makes us doubt whether someone who sees only in black and white can ever really know red, no matter how exhaustive their understanding of its physical properties. The belief that this thisness is inherent, or, to use one of Martin’s favourite terms, ‘indwelling’, is what makes Martin’s art an art of immanence rather than transcendence, and hence inimical to abstraction. Paul Martin, one feels, was an artist who would have held strongly to the watchword or battle cry of the poet William Carlos Williams: ‘no ideas but in things’.
The human figure returned to Martin’s work in a series of quiet, domestic scenes which are, however, not as simple as they first appear. Viewing the Pale Distance is a self-portrait of the artist gazing through a window at what has been identified as the Kintyre peninsula. The emphasis on life-drawing at the Royal Academy meant that Martin had already produced a great many studies of heads, of faces, and, of course, a great many self-portraits. The enduring popularity of the genre is to do with our conviction that, whatever Shakespeare might say, we can indeed find the mind’s construction in the face, as well as our innate tendency to pareidolic daydreams in which we see faces everywhere. Here, though, Martin has his back to us, and his face hidden. Georges Bataille once claimed that the three things man cannot look at directly are the sun, the genitals and death; in less stridently transgressive tones we might add our own back to the list. If the business of painting is founded on an act of looking, Viewing the Pale Distance becomes an impossible picture; impossible, that is, without the use of a system of mirrors, whose absence becomes the obtrusive absence, the speaking silence, the aporia which disrupts and subverts the painting’s carefully constructed casual facade. Whatever Martin is painting here it is not what is in front of him, not what he sees. Self-portraits from behind are relatively uncommon, but one such, and by an artist Martin much admired, is the Vermeer known as the Allegory of Painting (although it only acquired that title after Vermeer’s death and the work is arguably not an allegory at all). In it, if it is accepted as a self-portrait, we have Vermeer painting Vermeer painting; in Viewing the Pale Distance, we have Martin looking at Martin looking. In both cases the very act of painting is placed in brackets and becomes the focus of enquiry; in both cases the artifice of art is laid bare. Self-portraits or avatars of Martin, often dressed for the studio, are a recurrent motif in his work and each time perhaps pose questions about what painting does, and how, and why. In another work from around the same time, Wishing, Hoping and Imagining, a child is using what appears to be a magic wand (in fact the remote control for a toy truck) to cast a spell on some plums nesting in a fruit bowl; a shaft of light coming through the window shows us that one of the plums is indeed rising into the air unaided. Of course we know that a toy remote control cannot really cause plums to levitate: no, Martin might be saying, but painting can.
A bride and bridegroom clasp each other, their expression slightly stunned in wonder at this new thing that is born, that is no longer ‘you’ or ‘I’ but ‘us’, their wedding crowns replaced by chaplets of wild flowers, the complex intertwining of their fingers showing that they are indeed become one flesh. Beside them is a tree, behind, a hill whose russet warmth envelops them. It is perhaps the Mount of Paradise described in the verses of Ephraim the Syrian, which engulfs, embraces and caresses those who stand in its foothills, and whose ascent will be the journey of their lives together. Above, in the sky, swirling clouds seem about to resolve themselves into signs and symbols.
In Martin’s Tulips, a vase of flowers sits on a windowsill next to a cracked, or hatched, egg, another recurring motif. The painting is dominated, though, by the blind behind, in whose interlocking patterns of horizontal and vertical lines we can detect the influence of Japanese ukiyo-e prints, which Martin encountered in the Floating World exhibition at the V&A in 1973, an exhibition he would later acknowledge as a formative influence on the development of his art. He was fascinated by the intricate decorative patterning on screens, wall hangings and textiles; by the way the Japanese artists used colour, not blended but in blocks; fascinated too by their lack of interest in perspective or in giving the illusion of depth. He also admired the way in which figures were combined in these prints, and there is something in Martin’s treatment of the lepers in his Pool of Bethesda, for example, that is reminiscent of ukiyo-e renditions of sumo wrestlers or kabuki actors. Above all, Martin was impressed by the way these artists had engaged with their contemporary reality: having increasingly felt stifled by the Western representational tradition, he had long been seeking a new way of painting that led neither to abstraction nor to something like Pre-Raphaelite antiquarianism.
Significant though Martin’s encounter with the artists of the floating world undoubtedly was, when the new way of painting finally arrived it owed less to artistic experimentation than to his faith. Raised in a Baptist home and with a background in the evangelical Protestant tradition, Martin found himself increasingly alienated from it and eventually converted to the Orthodox Church. From an artistic point of view this conversion was important in several ways. One was that Martin would have found in the teachings of Orthodoxy something that chimed with and reinforced his own sense of the sacredness of nature and of the presence of God in His material creation. The different emphasis placed by the Eastern and Western churches on this can be seen, it has been suggested, by their different approaches to church architecture: the soaring Gothic cathedrals of the West aspire to overcoming and to weightlessness, while Orthodox churches, particularly those of the cross-in-square type, have an earthy solidity that speaks of a profound respect for their own materiality. In his essay on ‘History’, Ralph Waldo Emerson describes the Gothic cathedral as ‘a blossoming in stone subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man’. The notion of stone subdued by the demands of man is one that Martin would have rejected temperamentally, artistically, intellectually and theologically. Another consequence of conversion was that it fostered a growing interest in Orthodox and Byzantine artistic traditions, and especially in icons and wall-paintings, both those from the Orthodox world itself and those produced in early renaissance Italy but executed in the maniera greca style. Martin made a close study of the techniques of icon painting, both here and on the holy mountain of Mount Athos, and himself became an accomplished maker of icons (the preferred term is ‘icon writer’, perhaps because they are seen as a kind of visual theology). His icons and altarpieces are to be found in a number of churches around the country, but have never been exhibited in a gallery setting as they do not conform to common conceptions of what an art object should be. They are not personal or expressive, but are undertaken as a form of spiritual discipline, a form of prayer. It is in fact difficult to separate out these different strands in Martin’s work: to describe the one as ‘religious’ and the other ‘secular’ will not do as so many of his gallery pieces have religious themes, and all were approached in a deeply serious and prayerful manner. Perhaps the key difference is related to the idea of presence. Archbishop Damianos, abbot of the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai, home to the world’s finest collection of historical icons, has written that for the Orthodox faithful ‘icons are...living images of the saints, evoking their perpetual presence‘. Icons are held to have an indwelling real presence, gallery works are not, a distinction which has important consequences.
In icons, as in Martin’s work, figures are elongated and slender and placed in unnatural or impossible postures, which has led some to describe them as being ‘abstracted’. This, though, was never a concern for Byzantine writers, possibly because they had a more sophisticated concept of representation and understood that what was being shown was not merely the body but also its ascesis, or discipline. Eyes and faces for the most part betray no emotion but convey rather a sense of apatheia, of dispassionate equanimity. In Martin’s work we may read those faces as expressing wisdom or compassion, perhaps even the idea that in the end wisdom and compassion are the same thing, but this too has its theological justification, for there is a tradition that holds that apatheia is not an end in itself, but merely a necessary precursor to the achievement of agape, a selfless and universal love. Like the Japanese artists of the ukiyo-e, icon writers eschew linear perspective. Since linear perspective affords a privileged status to a certain point of view, helping to forge the notion of a stable, unified and masterful viewing subject, its absence is quite humbling. The lack of perspective also means there is no coercion of the eye, leaving it free to roam and linger, which contributes to the icon’s collapsing of time.
This timelessness that is so prominent a feature of the icon is something at which Martin was consciously aiming, and he often spoke of his desire to create in his paintings an arena of contemplative stillness. We live today in an age that is more saturated in images than any other in human history, and a large proportion of them are advertisement or exhortation, urging us forward into the constant press of events, the ceaseless busyness of getting and spending. Martin wanted to suspend all this and create a space where past and present, and future too, could all meet in communion. In Event at San Marco, the contemporary figure of the woman at the front of the picture and the actors in Fra Angelico’s Annunciation behind co-exist in the same reality, a technique Martin also used in The Restorer, which hangs in the church of St Luke’s, Holloway in London, while in The Pool of Bethesda, the archaic and patriarchal figure to the right, magnificent in his priestly vestments, contrasts yet co-exists with the woman to the left, wearing modern dress and holding a veronica or mandylion. Sometimes this temporal collapse can be achieved in a single figure: the man holding a fat hen to the left of The Great Cloud of Witnesses is crowned and bearded and wearing what appears at his shoulders to be another ecclesiastical robe, which then turns into a combination of jacket, checked slacks and lace-up shoes. In Martin’s work, painted under the influence of Byzantium, time, human time, is no more, for a while at least.
A wooden panel, gessoed and hinged, not inscribed, but scrawled and scratched with names. At least, some of them are names, the ones we can read, Harry, John, Graham, Elizabeth. Others are just marks, illegible, perhaps people who have lost their names. What would it be like to lose your name? Would it matter? Rudyard Kipling thought so, assuring every unknown soldier that he was known unto God. When voices were raised in Parliament against the cost of his memorials Kipling, whose own son lay among the lost dead in a nameless grave, grew angry: why could these people not see ‘how more than fortunate they are to have a name on a headstone'. It would be difficult to disagree, but why? And what of the soldiers that lie beneath, are they better off still having their name?
Though never part of their inner circle, the painter Edgar Degas regularly attended meetings of Les Mardistes, a group of Parisian intellectuals who would gather at the home of the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé to discuss art and music, poetry and philosophy. On one such occasion Degas remarked to his host how much he regretted that he did not have the other’s gift for verse, since his head was teeming with ideas for poems. ‘But, my dear Degas’, Mallarmé replied, his eyebrow cocked, ‘poems are not made of ideas, but of words’. Indeed they are, and words are not ideas, and nor are they meanings. To think that, because some words have meanings attached, words somehow are their meanings is as naive as to think that, because language is sometimes pressed into service as a means of communication - with somewhat mixed results – language is communication; naive, and wrong. Words are much more, and less, than that. There are, after all, many perfectly serviceable words that have no meanings at all: words which are used up in their utterance, like ‘abracadabra’ and ‘om’; nonsense words and nonce coinages, like Lewis Carroll’s ‘brillig’ or ‘slithy’; or something like ‘kuboa’, the word ‘discovered’ by the narrator of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, a word which has ‘letters as a word has’, he tells us, and which is ‘of profound import’, but about which he can say only what it is not and not what it is, making it like the God of apophatic theology.
Even where words do have meanings they are never mere vehicles to transport that meaning unchanged from mind to mind. Words are more than that, they are affricates and aspirates, dithyrambs and diphthongs, metaphor and metonymy, glyph and grapheme, rhythm and rhyme, assonance, allusion and, of course, alliteration; they are agglutinative conglomerates and holophrastic hammers; they are shrieks and sighs and prayers and whispers; are labial, nasal, palatal, glottal; are voiced or voiceless, with breathing rough or smooth or sibilant or blocked; they are false friends and etymological revenants; words are things, and as things they have their own materiality. As a poet Mallarmé knew this, because that knowledge is what makes poetry; as a poetry lover Paul Martin knew it too, all that whirling churn.
In 2009 the BAFTA nominated filmmaker Christina Alepi made an animation of Martin’s Cat’s Cradle (a painting previously known as Wordboard). It was an animation Martin greatly admired as he felt it brought out all the rhythm and movement that had been latent in the picture but that painting could not convey, felt that Alepi had gone places painting could not go. In it the main figure works almost obsessively through all the possibilities and positions of her game while on the board behind her the words and signs and symbols, likewise in permanent motion, are forming, deforming and reforming, working through the possibilities of their own materiality, their thisness. For Martin the word is the logos, is Christ (from the opening of John’s gospel), is the word of harmony and order, and the word that creates each thing as it uniquely is, and dwells in it; as Cat’s Cradle, and Alepi’s animation, suggest, it is not inert but retains its power. What is being said here about Martin’s concept of the word applies equally to his ideas about light. The critic JoAnn van Seventer said of Martin that he was ‘above all a colourist’, and it is true that his use of colour and his understanding of its influence on tone and mood and situation was exemplary. Nevertheless one might argue that his primary concern was always with light and that colour was for Martin a manifestation or perturbation of light, light stained to make it visible. This is particularly evident in the work he made during his time in Australia: in a painting like The Visitors light overwhelms, and Martin paints it as a thing (and according to Genesis of course it was the first of all created things), attending to its materiality, the truth of its being and its creative power. In a number of his works Martin goes so far as to name light, calling it forth, scratching the word ‘fos’ into his surfaces, the transliteration of the Greek reminding us that light is also Christ, who said, ‘eimai o fos tou kosmou', ‘I am the light of the world’ before he made the blind man see. Paul Martin always painted things, but this encompassed far more than we might expect, not just the book press and the broken cisterns, but light, and words, and signs, and symbols, and even, in his monoprints, the individual mark or gesture.
One of Martin’s early poetic influences was George Herbert, the 17th century writer who exploited the materiality of language to the full, employing anagrams and acrostics and even numerological codes, in his verse. He is perhaps best known for his pattern poems, works like 'The Altar' or 'Easter Wings' in which the words on the page are arranged so as to resemble the subject of the poem. For Martin too, as a visual artist, it is writing, the appearance of words that is so often key. Sometimes he will write words on words to create an impenetrable thicket or entangled bank of signifiers that no longer signify, as though meaning itself has been overgrown by their rank profusion; sometimes his letters are twisted and distorted so that they seem part of some new alphabet that defies all our efforts to read it, suggesting the occult power that accrued to writing in ages when most were illiterate and the ability to spell out a neck verse could quite literally (that is, by the letter) save your life. Martin explored the various contexts in which words have been used: in works inspired by the centuries of graffiti on the walls of the Duomo in Florence he reflected on the intense need people have felt to assert their being and their being there, even if only by scratching their name, and reflected too on the nature and function of his own artist’s signature, and what it means when it becomes just one more name among so many. In The Offering he explored the idea of the prayer wall, of prayers hidden in cracks and crevices that still retain their power, though unseen; while Tablet and Memoir engage with the idea of the memorial, their lists of names a pledge and a plea that they be not forgotten.
At the heart of Herbert’s pattern poems lies a paradox: the more the words on the page are marshalled into a semblance of their referent, the more we are aware that no such relationship exists between sign and thing, or word and world. The signifier is not the signified and in no way resembles it, and between the two there is always a gap, like that impossible gap between the words and the board on which they are written into which the spectral second presence insinuates itself in Cat’s Cradle. In this gap we find misreadings and multiple readings, figurative language and the necessity of interpretation. In 2004, Martin embarked on a series of bronze reliefs, which were originally intended to form a door like those of the mediaeval Basilica of San Zeno in Verona. The San Zeno doors attracted him by their visceral directness and primitive vigour, qualities he sought to emulate, as well as by the relationship of form and surface, by the way the reliefs responded to light and shade, and by the material effects of weathering and patination. The San Zeno doors are decorated with biblical scenes and scenes from the life of the saint; for his bronzes Martin turned once more to poetry, to the 4th century theologian and hymnodist Ephraim the Syrian and his Hymns on Paradise. If the icon can be regarded as painted theology, then the Hymns on Paradise are theology chanted or sung: in terms of Aristotelian rhetoric, Ephraim shifts modes from logos, or reason – the Aristotelian sense being quite different to Martin’s – to pathos, to sensuous imagery that appeals to the feelings rather than the rational mind. Since he still wants to convey his theological message Ephraim turns to allegory, in which everything speaks of something else and, as Ephraim says, here prefiguring one of Martin’s recurring motifs, ‘in seedlings you can observe symbols clearly marked'. Allegory, Ephraim claims, is divinely sanctioned. In our sinful fallen state we have lost the capacity for direct or positive knowledge of God: like Hamsun’s protagonist in his apophatic prison, we can only say what He is not, and not what He is. Taking pity on our predicament, God unbends and unfolds himself towards us; as Christ dons the mantle of mortal flesh, so God, in Ephraim’s account, dons the mantle of words, and dresses Himself in metaphors more fitted to our feeble understanding. As the poet himself says, ‘He puts on names because of our weakness’. Man can thus attend to these words of God, and then hymn them back to Him, and so the breach between the creature and creator is healed.
Of course, once the gap between the signifier and the signified had opened up and Ephraim had moved beyond the literal, it was never going to stop with allegory, and by mediaeval times biblical hermeneutics recognised four different levels of interpretation, the literal, the allegorical, the moral and the anagogical, which treated of last things. The classic exposition of this is in a letter from the poet Dante to his patron Cangrande della Scalla. Taking as his text the psalmist’s account of the departure from Egypt of the children of Israel, Dante (or the pseudo-Dante: the authenticity of the letter is in dispute) says, ‘from allegory it means for us our redemption done by Christ: from the moral sense, it means to us the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the state of grace; from the analogical, it means the leave taking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory'. One could apply this technique to Martin’s own work: In a Green Shade depicts a procession of three figures through a forest clearing, while in front of them a woman sits holding flowers. The central figure is a self-portrait, Martin dressed for the studio; the figure in front has a scythe across his shoulders and his head at an impossible angle, his body taking on the form of a tree or a cross (and the tree and the cross have long been metaphorically linked, as in the pattern poem 'This Crosstree' Here by Robert Herrick, a contemporary of George Herbert).The clearing offers the travellers shade and a place to rest, the forest, bursting forth with life, offers up its bounty, while the flowers the woman is holding also have the aspect of a gift. The clearing is a place of selfless giving, a place of agape, of love, while the cross that appears is a symbol of God’s love for man and the focus of man’s adoration of God: the picture can be read as an allegory of earthly and divine love. In the moral sense the picture may stress the importance of keeping to the path and following the cross no matter what temptations may appear along the way, since our purpose is not pleasure but the pursuit of perfection; viewed anagogically the picture tells us of our finitude, as we are led by the scythe, the figure of death, but it also offers the promise of the cross that it will triumph over the sting of death. Of course, these are not the only possible interpretations, even within the mediaeval hermeneutic schema, and that schema itself is hardly exhaustive. It may be that there is no end to the proliferation of possible interpretations: Hannah Arendt, after all, held that the difference between art and entertainment was that art could never be ‘used up’. I do not know if any of these interpretations are correct, though some seem more plausible than others, and certainly none of them have anything to say about the third member of the procession. I do not even know what would make an interpretation more, or less correct. This is a gallery picture, not a picture of presence, whether that be the scriptural authority on which Dante leans, or what Archbishop Damianos calls ‘the collective sensibility and memory of the living church’ which gives authority to the icon. Without that presence, I do not know and I cannot know, and all the while, combining and recombining, the signs and symbols on the wordboard continue their dance.
When Orpheus sang all nature listened, when Orpheus died all nature mourned, but not for long, or so the story goes, for his songs were taken up by woodlands and caves, and streams and mountains, and carried overseas by the wind and the waves, and at his graveside all the songbirds gathered to praise the singing god who taught the earth to sing. The sound collage 'Orpheus Sings', based on the Orpheus myth as reimagined by Rilke, was a collaboration between Paul Martin and his son Ben. A layering of sampled sounds with single notes and chords played on guitar, bone flute and prepared mandolin it is less concerned with tune than with texture, timbre and tone. It sounds unearthly, as the earth might sound.t
The Byzantine icon tradition is both rich and austere. It is rich in its use of materials, the space behind the saint often filled with glowing gold, but austere in that there is no background detail, no illusionistic landscape to please the eye. Icons are severely limited in who they portray and with which attributes, in which postures, which expressions, which gestures, but they are rich in significance as there is nothing extraneous, nothing in these images that is without meaning, even though we may not recognise it. Walk into a traditional Orthodox church and look up, and there in the dome you will see the image of Christ Pantocrator, Christ the Ruler of All, looking down and blessing you. We know He is blessing us because in His left hand He is holding a book of the gospels, while His right is raised in the gesture of blessing. Were the book to be open and the position of the hands slightly altered, we would know that He was not blessing, but teaching - except, of course, that many of us would not know this at all.
Chiromania or chirologia, the language of hands, is part of a larger rhetoric of gesture that Byzantine icon writers inherited from the Roman world – and we should remember that, although Gibbon may have popularised a date of 476 AD for the collapse of the Roman Empire, this is very much a Western perspective. In the East the Empire lasted until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the population thought of themselves, and called themselves not Byzantines but Romans. In making use of the rhetoric of gesture, icon writers were aligning themselves with an unbroken, living tradition. In the West, orators were more and more employing what was called ‘natural gesture' – as ever that ‘natural’ is questionable - and abandoning the subtleties of Byzantine practice. Francis Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning, described the language of gesture as ‘transitory hieroglyphs’: today most of us approach these hieroglyphs blind, with no Champollion or Rosetta Stone to guide us.
Paul Martin’s work abounds, or appears to abound, in the language of gesture, the hands of his figures frequently charged with a meaning that eludes – but only just – our understanding. If we are no longer fluent in the language then this is hardly surprising, but the problem is made worse by the work’s narrative nature, by the fact that, though these elongated fingers seem expressly designed to speak, they have to do other things too, which can make it hard to hear what they have to say. Unlike icons, Martin’s pictures are rich in detail, but with detail comes noise and a loss of clarity. It is also perhaps the case that Martin does not always want us to understand, that he is at times evasive and ambiguous. His paintings are full of mysterious elements, and mystery was something with which he was himself very comfortable. ‘God has taken up residence in creation,’ he once said, ‘something which I can’t understand but which I can accept.’ Martin possessed to a marked degree what Keats called ‘negative capability’, and perhaps demands the same of the viewer.
Event at San Marco – even the title is a provocation and a concealment ‘what event exactly? – blurs the boundaries between different worlds and different times, between the contemporary world of the female at the front and the world of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, which dominates the picture in the same way as the slatted blind dominated Martin’s Tulips. In fact there is a third layer of blurring as at the centre of his fresco Fra Angelico has included a trompe l’oeil depiction of the door to one of the monkish cells of San Marco itself. Martin’s rendition of the fresco is a bravura performance, but it is not a copy, not quite, and the differences are small but telling. Unlike in the fresco, and almost all other depictions of the Annunciation, Gabriel and Mary are not looking at each other, their eyes do not meet. Not only that, but the woman in the front of the picture is not looking at the fresco, not looking at the viewer, as Martin’s figures so often do, and not looking at the letter or paper she is holding in her hand, but is looking beyond the frame, beyond what we can see. So often we rely on the eyes, on gazes exchanged, to work out what is going on in a picture, but here we are denied all that. In the fresco, the window in the door to the monk’s cell is barred, leading critics to speculate that it might represent the Virgin’s womb, or her virginity, or the central mystery of the Christian religion; in Martin’s version it is entirely blacked out, rendered even more unreadable. Another point worth making about this window is that it is square, in a painting composed almost entirely of arches, though its shape is echoed by the piece of paper the woman is holding. Martin, as we have seen is an artist whose work is written over, scrawled over, deluged in words, but the paper here is entirely blank. Event at San Marco is almost an allegory of the unreadable.
The diptych Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves is a work very much written on but equally difficult to read. The title comes from a poem by Gérard Manley Hopkins, usually grouped with his ‘terrible sonnets’, which tells of the coming of night, of death, and of the disorder into which it throws the earth.
...her being as unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs...
The Sibyl is the Cumaean Sybil, who prophesied for Aeneas in Virgil’s great epic and guided him on his journey to the underworld, prefiguring the role played by Virgil himself in the Divine Comedy up until the heartbreaking moment when Virgil, as a pagan, must disappear. Aeneas asks the Sibyl to speak her prophecies, to give her answers presence; her usual practice is to write them out, a word at a time, on oak leaves. As the leaves are scattered, the sense is scattered too. In like fashion the diptych features individual words from the Hopkins poem scattered over its surface. Wrenched from the context of the poem these words are reduced to the status of fragments, perhaps the fragments TS Eliot had ‘shored against my ruins’. Don Paterson has an aphorism, though, that might be read as a riposte to Eliot: ‘Fragments indeed! As if there ever was anything to break’.
Paul Martin did not leave behind many sketchbooks, as preliminary or preparatory sketches were not a significant part of his artistic practice, but as a voracious reader he did leave notebooks, what would once have been called commonplace books, in which he jotted down the gleanings of that reading. In one of these, dating from this stage of his career, we find an entry consisting of a single word, underlined twice: 'punctum’. Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, his treatise on photography, distinguishes two aspects of the photograph. One is the studium, the product of the shared cultural and educational background of viewer and photographer: it is what enables the viewer to take in the photograph at a glance,to read the compositional elements, to encounter and understand the photographer’s intentions. Barthes does not denigrate the studium so much as damn it with faint praise, admitting to taking a ‘polite interest’ in it, but in a text littered with words like ‘banality’ and ‘homogeneity’. The punctum, by contrast, ‘rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow’, it wounds, it pricks, it stings, it is the detail that grabs hold of him and will not let go. The studium is not a product of the thing, but arises from a contract between photographer and viewer and the attitudes and habits that they share, while the punctum is, in Martin’s terms, the thisness of the thing expressing itself. Bathes repeatedly stresses that he is writing as a viewer and not a photographer, and so can acknowledge a tepid interest in the studium, but for Martin as an artist it is a threat as it has the capacity to overwhelm or stifle the very thing that interests him. Rhetoric exploits the thing for its own purposes; perspective co-opts it to its task of constructing the viewing subject as the locus of knowledge and power;narrative is dictated by the demands of the narrative form, not by the truth of things; all belong to the realm of studium, hence Martin’s suspicion or rejection of them. Are any of them even real? Was there ever anything to break? Martin’s point perhaps was that we had allowed our thinking to be dominated by the wrong things; if he was ambiguous or evasive and refused to give us answers it was maybe because he thought we were asking the wrong questions. The human figure provokes us to questions that demand narrative answers and so it had to disappear, at least for a time, but it is not the only thing to have abandoned the stage; also absent from Martin’s art now is the window, or more pertinently, the frame.
At first glance it seems to be what it says it is, a tiny patch of black beach, minutely observed and minutely recreated, the kind of thing we might associate with the Boyle Family. There is beauty in it, a great delight in its tactile surfaces, but there is shame in it too, as we see what the tide has brought in. Shame, but no surprise. But the Boyle Family pick their patches of ground at random, and there is nothing random about the choice of this beach. This is Iona, where the Irish monks first came ashore, thinking it the perfect place to live a life of purity and perhaps talk to their God. What comes ashore here now? The uncleanness of the people. It is difficult to take your eyes off those false teeth: they have become a punctum, a prick, a wound and a reproach.
Even as human figures were disappearing from his work, Martin was promising their return, though only once they could ‘identify with, be an extension of the landscape...be made of the same visual language’. These remarks are from an interview Martin gave about his exhibition When Men and Mountains Meet, an exhibition deeply influenced by his reading of Rainer Maria Rilke, and Martin may have been thinking of Rilke’s claim that, ‘landscape is foreign to us...however mysterious death might be, life that is not our own is far more so, life that is not concerned with us and without us celebrates its own festivals...and we look on with a certain embarrassment like a chance guest who speaks another language’. What he came to call his Concretions were Martin’s attempt to learn the language of landscape, and not just the language of landscape, but the language of things, a category that for him would include the language of sign, mark and symbol; not what they mean, but the language that they speak, as it were, among themselves.
The Concretions have a vigour, an energy, an urgency about them that suggests how vital that task was, a sense of urgency that is reinforced by the way that so many of the Concretions form themselves into groups or sequences, as if Martin were working again and again through the same problem. The painter acknowledges this, going so far as to give names to these groups – Graphos, Mundi, Seawrack Rising – and the individual works in these groups have something of the character of essays, of trials or scientific experiments. Perhaps this is not surprising, perhaps this is the only way such a task could have been undertaken, given Martin’s commitment to the unique thisness of things. The comparison with scientific experiments is particularly interesting since both artist and scientists are concerned, in their different ways, with the materiality of things. The abstract, the conceptual, reasoning and theory can only take them so far before they have to return to the grit and dirt of the real, in Martin’s case the reality of river and rock, tree and sky. Science aims at a true knowledge of the world, but knows it can never know if it possesses such knowledge; it knows it can never prove anything and it knows better than to try. Art, since it serves no utilitarian purpose, can never be good enough unless it is perfect, and perfection is in the nature of things unattainable.The tasks of both artist and scientist are never-ending, though in truth neither are sorry about that; they are Sisyphean, but as Camus said, ‘il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux’. The doing is what matters.
Many of the Concretions were the results of field trips undertaken to the Trossachs, to the rivers of East Lothian and the beaches of Iona, and these trips represented for Martin a return to drawing, to sitting before a landscape, to looking intently and letting what you see guide your hand. Drawing involves a heightened form of receptivity, involves entering into a relationship with an object or a landscape and allowing it to speak to you: once again, Martin liked to quote Rilke on the subject. ‘In order for a thing to speak to you’, he wrote, ‘you must regard it for a certain time as the only one that exists, as the one and only phenomenon, which through your laborious and exclusive love is now placed at the centre of the universe’. This love is laborious not because of any resistance in the landscape, not because we have to overwhelm its defences, to penetrate and dissect it in order to lay bare its inner being; on the contrary landscapes and things are open and generous, always speaking, always singing, and would sing to us if we would or could listen. The labour involved is the labour of removing the barriers of habit and custom and rhetoric and narrative and self. Just as apatheia is the necessary precursor to the selfless love of agape, so selflessness is the necessary precursor to seeing the world as it sees itself and hearing its song. If what we then see is not what we have been accustomed to seeing, that does not mean it is not what we should be seeing. When Paul Martin said, at the time of his When Men and Mountains Meet exhibition, that ‘I do not consider myself to be a non-representational artist,’ we probably should, as a bare minimum, believe that he meant it. Similarly when Martin claims that ‘new work has a habit of making or at least suggesting itself’, or when he says that he has learnt to leave things to themselves so that ‘the paintings are free to develop in the way that they want to develop', or even when he says of his paintings that ‘I often ask them for their opinions...we have to work together', an examination of his working practices on the Concretions suggest that this was not mere whimsy or talking in riddles, that he may have been speaking with as much precision as he could.
The collaged monoprints that form a substantial part of the Concretions were produced by a process of layering that was necessarily gradual and time-consuming; indeed a sense of time could be said to be inscribed in the finished works, but it is the time of tree rings or the laying down of rocks rather than an artificial imposition of clock time. Each mark made in the process set up a range of possibilities for what could follow, and hence these monoprints were not, could not be, executed according to a preconceived plan. At their best, though, the finished works have a satisfying sense of completeness, perhaps even of inevitability. Not all did work, but even in those he abandoned Martin would often see some mark, some line, some gesture that he could excerpt from the abandoned piece and make the starting point for a new one: as he said of his work in general, ‘I do have failures, but they do not always remain so’. The process was not aleatory, not given over to chance; the artist was always present, making choices, but making choices from a range of options laid down by the work itself: the process was indeed one of working together. The finished work would tell the story of its own making, or its own becoming, since from the point of view of the work the process was, at least in part, one of self-fashioning. The development of these monoprints, beginning with a simple mark or gesture and building up to a finished piece of real depth and complexity is filled with the drama of the choices made along the way – a drama that avoids running behind, running after an imposed narrative – even though, looking back from the end it may feel as if it could not possibly have been otherwise. It is a process that might be compared to the way a simple musical theme can give rise to a dazzling series of variations, variations that proliferate as easy as interpretations, when ‘from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful...are evolved”. Paul Martin frequently spoke of his desire for an art that grew as grass and trees and mountains grew, an art that worked like nature itself. That last quotation comes at the end of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species: it may be that in his monoprints Martin came as close as he ever could to achieving that aim.
Teaching Birds to Build Nests is unfinished, and may be the last painting Martin was working on before he died. As such it is deeply poignant, but it also allows us to imagine what he would have done with it, how he would have fleshed out these bare bones, the layering up of wax, pigment, varnish, glue and gesso, textured with sand or sawdust or ash; the scratching in, the scorching and scraping back before the whole process began again. The techniques here are not dissimilar to those used in the monoprints, and in both instances they grow out of Martin’s insight that the thisness of things, the trace of the logos was not inert, but a powerfully creative force, and that things themselves – and the art that he aspired to make – coalesced around that force and substantiated it.
A black figure stands with his feet planted squarely, solidly on the ground although his spare and sinuous form seems to sway as if buffeted by the storm of paint spatter that rages all around, an astonishing, whirling electrical storm that has filled the sky with light and colour and set the air ablaze. Sparks dance around him, settling in his hair and on his tunic; over his shoulder hangs a bag, already full of glowing dabs of colour, his harvest from the storm.
Paul Martin’s late picture Gatherer of Sparks owes it’s imagery to the writings of the 16th century Jewish mystic Isaac Luria, and in particular to his teachings about the Shevirot Ha-Kelim, or the Breaking of the Vessels. According to the Lurianic Kabbala, when the light of divine creation was first sent forth it was to be received by ten vessels, though in the end only three were able to survive its tremendous power. The other seven broke, and as their shards tumbled downwards through heavens and worlds they drew the divine light to them; when they could fall no further they ended in our imperfect world where they manifested as sparks. Both the imagery and the content of this story are rich in allusive potential and referential possibilities, and it has attracted the attention of a number of artists: Anselm Kiefer, for example, made use of it to confront Germany’s Nazi past, with the shattered shards evoking the horror of Kristallnacht. For Paul Martin, the scattering of creative light was an echo of his own key concept of the creative power of the logos that dwells in the thisness of things. Martin, though, was less interested in the Shevirat Ha-Kelim itself than in what came after, the TikkunOlam, or Repair of the World. This doctrine held that the proper duty and purpose of mankind was to seek out the divine light and to gather up the sparks and thereby to return creation to the harmony that prevailed before the vessels were shattered. This is an idea that has clear parallels in other religious traditions, particularly Manichaeaism (though, unlike the Manichaeans, Lucia did not advocate farting as a sacred act). For Martin it had a bearing on his purpose not just as a human being, but also as an artist: it spoke to his duty to attend to things and landscapes, in all their thisness and materiality and, through Rilke’s laborious love, uncover the indwelling real logos which he could convey through his art to those whose eyes were dimmed by custom and could not see.
Rilke himself had another, different, conception of the duties of mankind, one which also underpinned Martin’s understanding of his role as an artist. At the same time as he was writing the Sonnets to Orpheus, as part of the same ‘boundless storm’ of creativity, Rilke was also completing his Duino Elegies. In the ninth of these, Rilke asks, ‘Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely in the form of a laurel’, why then do we have to be human and pass our lives under the shadow of death, at first the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, but always there, and growing. It is a question many have asked without expecting an answer, but Rilke has one. It is ‘because everything here apparently needs us’, because ‘we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate...’. Because we have knowledge of our finitude we are ‘the most fleeting of all’ in this ‘fleeting world’ and this allows us to speak these words ‘more intensely than the things themselves ever dreamed of existing’, thus elevating them beyond what they could otherwise achieve: one thinks of Martin’s still-life paintings early in his career. Life, Rilke says, is ‘once for each thing. Just once, no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once, to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing’; this is what gives our words power. Our words, our speaking, is what lifts things from the unsayable to the sayable, from the visible to the invisible. In a letter to his Polish translator Witold Halewicz, Rilke expanded on this: ‘We are bees of the invisible’, he wrote, ‘we perpetually gather the honey of the visible world to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible’. By doing this we can heal the breach between man and nature and ensure that we and all other created things are standing on the same ground.
For Ephraim the Syrian, God, unbending, used words to stand on the same ground as man; for Rilke, things need our words to stand on the same ground as us; for Isaac Luria, man’s duty is to gather the sparks of divine creation, sparks that Paul Martin associates with the logos indwelling in the thisness of things. These are the three strands which are interwoven in Martin’s astonishing vision in these final works, a vision of the great sweep of things, from the divine to the dust beneath our feet, all pulsing with being, all shimmering, all shining, all lit up from within by the afterglow of creation. Martin once said that ‘the act of painting can be...an extension of Christ’s transfiguration of the material world'. These final paintings are just such a transfiguration, and like all transfigurations change us utterly, not just our way of seeing, but our way of being too. In his translation of the gospel accounts of the transfiguration, William Tyndale has Peter say, ‘master here is good beinge for vs'. The King James version has the rather more prosaic, ‘Master, it is good for us to be here', and this may be all Tyndale intended, but his words are suggestive of something more, and that something more is what Paul Martin’s vision provides.
Gregor Sloss, Where Echoes Rest, 2025