PAUL MARTIN: MINING THE SACRED
BY MALCOLM DONEY
I first met Paul in 1968 at a shabby conference centre near Worcester, where he had traveled with a group of fellow Birmingham School of Art students. Christian art students from across the UK had gathered together for a weekend to listen to talks by an affable, plump, pipe-smoking Dutch art historian, Professor J R Rookmaaker.
Rookmaaker, was a deep and original thinker. One of his most liberating maxims for the painters among us was that “art needs no justification”. As earnest young Christians this freed us from the need to proselytise through our work, or to restrict ourselves to religious themes. He encouraged us to find visual languages appropriate to our world view, which was formative for Paul. He always remembered the Professor’s words: “Paint what you love.”
Paul was born in 1948 in Bournemouth – he often said he'd been brought up in a beach-hut - instilling a lifelong love of the sea and shore. The family eventually moved to Rugby, where he spent his schooldays. Not especially academic, he excelled in sports, representing Warwickshire at rugby and swimming, and leading a national schoolboy gymnastics team in Austria in 1964. He joined a local band as the drummer, an ensemble called Pinkerton’s Assorted Colours, which went on to score an unlikely top-ten hit with Mirror, Mirror in 1966.
But the desire to produce art won, and he ended up at Birmingham School of Art, then dominated by Abstract Expressionism, followed by the Royal Academy Schools, whose more traditional methods focused largely on life-drawing. Martin’s eccentric individualism meant that he felt at home in neither environment, describing those years as ones of “productive disagreement”.
In the early 1970s Paul met Sandra, then studying English at the University of Manchester. She was amazed and impressed by his knowledge of seventeenth century metaphysical poetry. They were engaged within a week, and married within the year. And they were together for more than 50 years.
Leaving the Royal Academy, the couple set up home in St Albans, Hertfordshire, where Paul taught part-time at several different schools and art colleges. He managed to paint one day a week in a studio nearby, and began to exhibit his work, to growing acclaim. Their first two sons, Thomas and Henry, were born during this period.
With a growing family, he applied for a full-time teaching post, ending up as Art Master at Rugby School for the next 20 years. A third son, Ben, was born in Rugby. Although initially reluctant to take up a full-time position, Martin soon became a talented and inspiring teacher. From his first days at art school, he had exhibited a thirst for the exploration of ideas and techniques. Among the boys he became universally known as Doc Martin, always wearing the boots which were forbidden to his students as “aggressive footwear”. He was a dreamer, but also a maker: an integrated approach he passed on to his students, many of whom went on to become artists in their own right.
An artist of enormous energy and application, he continued to paint and exhibit during this time. Paul always thought a great deal about what he was doing and why. He read widely and deeply. But when it came to explaining how these ideas were expressed in his work, he was – in the nicest possible way – deflective and non-specific. He began to make a name for himself with large, often semi-narrative paintings, with themes and figures drawn eclectically from the Bible, ancient mythology and contemporary life.
The stories and images, replete with repeated symbols – chequerboards, bells, birds, eggs, boats, paper crowns – were elusive, allusive, and deliberately unexplained. Paul embodied these images with a customised version of a traditional encaustic technique, which involved hot beeswax and ground pigments, but also sand, grit and other organic ingredients. The surfaces were pitted, scarred and abraded: the quality of the surface becoming as important as the images themselves.
He was a kind, friendly individual who was always engaging company despite his shyness. This came with an infectious, falsetto giggle that was pure joy. He had an impeccable, slightly tweedy, dress sense and a fine line in hats. In his impecunious student days, Sandra – out of pity – once sold some of her more expensive books to help him. He had told her he was always hungry. He met her the following week sporting a beautiful silk tie, purchased from Savile Row. She questioned him, a little indignantly. He pointed out, with no sense of shame, that it was “the perfect grey, exactly half-way between black and white.” This sense of style expressed itself in movement as well as appearance, when he and Sandra, in their fifties, became exponents of the Argentine Tango, joining the Edinburgh tango society and meeting regularly to dance and enjoy the music.
His evolving faith had, during this time, led him to migrate from the strict, Evangelical Baptist background of his youth, to an immersion in the much older tradition of Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, in whose rich iconographic heritage and stately liturgical forms, he felt more profoundly at home. He took up the practice of icon ‘writing’ himself, though he made a clear distinction between this and his personal art practice. That said, there was a tangible transfer of style and content which – almost by osmosis – passed into his paintings, giving them a distinctiveness which spoke to a growing number of collectors. One of these is the twice-Booker nominated Australian novelist Tim Winton, who writes:
"In the mid-80s, in Perth Western Australia, we walked into a gallery and saw an astounding show by an English painter . . . We went back several times and ended up buying three large pieces – at prices we couldn’t afford and that were surely far less than what they were worth. At the time we had a baby and hardly any money or furniture, but for years those paintings were the riches and companions we carried with us from house to house and town to town. They’re still with us – beautiful and mysterious and as full of life as they were the first day we saw them. We count them as blessings, moments of grace that have stayed with us all our lives.”
Following retirement from Rugby, the final ten years of his teaching career were spent in Edinburgh, as a lecturer and tutor at Leith School of Art, an independent art school, with a gentle underlying ethos of Christian spirituality. This period also saw a major shift in his work. The human figure disappeared from his paintings, and he became preoccupied with the physical landscape. Rejecting notions of the scenic or picturesque, his paintings became a tapestry of media, including small found objects (even false teeth on one occasion) and fragments of beach glass, sand, ash, and various home-made compounds. These weren’t abstracts, but looked as though they had been excavated or stripped from the earth, exhibiting a vertiginous depth and saturated colour.
Paul drew inspiration from thinkers such as the medieval Scottish priest and scholar, Duns Scotus, the 20th-century Austrian poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the French priest and palaeontologist, Teilhard de Chardin. With these, he shared an intuition that God was not a remote figure beyond the universe, but was somehow present in the very fabric, the materiality of creation. He liked to talk of a “Logos” that was seamlessly enfolded in the nature of things. "If there is a sacredness within creation, then I'd like to see it," he once said. "I know I have to commit myself in order to 'discover' it." He likened himself to a miner, digging among the lead-hills and turning up "little bits of preciousness within the ordinariness". He was also impressed by the 20th-century Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, who wrote: "Before the beautiful—no, not really before but within the beautiful — the whole person quivers. He not only 'finds' the beautiful moving; rather, he experiences himself as being moved and possessed by it."
In the year leading up to Paul’s illness and death, it seems that his working was beginning to shift yet again. He had prepared the ground, as it were, and figures shyly, tentatively, made their way back into the frame. He was still, in his mid-70s, alive to new horizons, new possibilities.
After Paul Martin’s death, his son Henry found this quote from Teilhard de Chardin written in one of his notebooks. It makes a fitting epitaph:
'Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within.'
At his father’s funeral Henry said: “I think Dad was painting Heaven. Not an obscure and distant Elysian Field, but the indwelling presence of the Word, visible to us if we only stop and rest in the moment.”
Malcolm Doney, Where Echoes Rest, 2025