C87 Article

Jason Oakley interviews printmaker Colin Martin

Colin Martin: Piglet, etching and carborundum, 34 x 39 cm;
photo Gerry Farrell; courtesy the artist

Printmaker Colin Martin's works present challenging scenarios of dysfunctional interactions between adults and children, or between children. It has been written that Martin employs "a non-directive style" that creates "tension and unease...we are allowed rather than forced to entertain...innocence or perversion, experimentation or abuse, acceptable or inappropriate." [1] The artist's works are multilayered, constructed from references to old masters such as Goya, Carravaggio and Rembrandt as well as cinematic and photographic sources.

Jason Oakley: Would you talk us through your recent exhibition House at the Temple Bar Gallery & Studios.

Colin Martin: The works comprise of a series of vignettes of different incidents that are intended to initiate a conversation with the viewer. I have used a domestic environment as a way of exploring different themes such as power and loss. I am also interested in the gap between an adult's reality and a child's reality. They are starting points as opposed to an end in themselves. My work aims to facilitate multiple readings and I want the viewer to bring their own experiences to the work.

JO: How much of your own experiences do you bring to the work?

CM: Well, they are not in any way auto-biographical. They may start with a tiny seed of something relevant to myself or people around me or something I've read or seen, but I deliberately try to remove it from myself. Very often with this kind of work there is an assumption that it must be the artist's own experiences.

JO: Who are your influences, and why?

CM: The major ones I suppose would be Goya and Caravaggio. The chiaroscuro lighting in both film and old master paintings interests me both aesthetically and thematically.

In my work I endeavour to create a tension between light and dark, as in a work like Babysitter which can be viewed by some people as being darkly comic or alternatively as an act of casual cruelty. I have been compared before to the American painter Eric Fischl. Also Brian Maguire's work from the early eighties opened me up to how powerful domestic subject matter can be.

I am also obviously influenced by the society around me and things I might read or images I might see in newspapers, books, television and film. Very small things can suggest an entire scenario or feed into a composition. It is also very much part of my working process that I appropriate and make my own additions to existing images.

JO: What do you consider to be the important artistic movements, trends at the moment?

CM: Well, I think a lot of video work is very interesting. The work of Bill Viola and Gillian Wearing I find extremely powerful. Their work transcends its medium, it's not just using a contemporary art form for its own sake. What I liked about Wearing's Sascha and Mum was the way the work moved between aggression and affection—however, the affection being of the kind you would lavish on a pet. The way in which it is run backwards adds to the whole strangeness of it, simultaneously there is truth and confusion.

JO: I am interested in what has drawn you to work in the area of Printmaking?

CM: Coming from a painting background it was more the craft base of print that I was interested in—this provided me with a technical basis and language to work from. While the results can be very painterly, there is a kind of translucency and resonance in the etching process that I found hard to achieve in painting.

I'm not actually so interested in the fact that you can edition prints. I don't have too be too precious about each image and I can use different proofs to try out different overlays of tone and colour, which can greatly affect the atmosphere of the image.

Jason Oakley is the Features Editor of the SSI Newsletter and a freelance art writer.

[1] Eoin Galavan, preface to House catalogue, Triskel Arts Centre, Cork 1997.

Colin Martin was a recipient of the 1998 Michael Byrne/Arts Council Print Award. He has also participated in Eight Cities: Temple Bar International Print Show 1998 curated by Brian Kennedy. In1997 he represented Ireland in the 22nd Biennial of Graphic Art in Slovenia.

Interview reproduced from CIRCA 87, Spring 1999, pp. 31-33.

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