Painting

Title

Pontilist Life Painting No.1

Date

1963

Size

63 x 45cm

Materials

Oil on board

Painted from life whilst at Goldsmiths College studying for the NDD.

Title

Constructed painting

Date

1964

Size

145 x 105cm

Materials

Oil paint on canvas

Exhibited in the Northern Young Contemporaries at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester. A comparison peice was bought by London borough of Bromley in 1966.

Title

Red and blue modulations

Date

1965

Size

150 x 150cm

Materials

Household paint on board

To understand Martin's ambitions as a painter and how the paintings relate to his Kinetic sculptures one needs to return to the early works. Red and Blue Modulations (1965) envelopes you the closer you stand to the canvas. As it stretches almost five feet tall and five feet wide, the golden ground fills you with warmth, the alternating colours seem so random but the mind races to construct patterns, groups, circles, arcs, even swells that are not there. In the same milli-second of encounter another side of the brain offers ideas, associations, to help prevent a sense of bewilderment: are they bees, swarming against sunlight, or people far below on some vast dance floor, couples circling, embracing, separating, or is this some biological structure, a diagram of genes, a molecular model?The guessing game goes on until a superior, management side of the brain calls a halt to the guesswork and decides what it is. Oh yes, modern art, very good, now move along please.

Julius Bryant in The tomorrow of my yesterday

Title

Black and White Relief

Date

1965

Size

130 x 127cm

Materials

Household paint, wood, plastic

Collection

Private collection

The correspondence between Martin's paintings and machines in the 1960s is closest between his Black and white Relief (1965) and Constructed painting (1964-5). In the relief, each plastic sphere is mounted on a watch spring to extend it from its black circle on the painted wooden surface. The visual effect is both random and repetitive. In the painted equivalent of this conception the spheres seem to invert, their backgrounds suggesting holes in a perforated steel sheet, yet none of them are painted from a consistent viewpoint. Consequently, the surface seems to flow and distort. This is the closest Martin came to making Op Art, as it left him with no love of patient, mechanical, repetitive painting.

Julius Bryant in The tomorrow of my yesterday

Title

Taking a line for a dance I,
in a series of 15

Date

1974

Size

61 x 51 cm

Materials

Acrylic on arches paper

Title

Taking a line for a dance II,
in a series of 15

Date

1974

Size

61 x 51 cm

Materials

Acrylic on arches paper

 

Title

Space & Movement, Taking a line for a dance, number 27

Date

2012

Materials

Acrylic paint, canvas, metal

Collection

Private collection