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.
