Andy Martin
In the realm of contemporary visual art, illustrator Andy Martin stands out for his way with words. The former London dweller has contributed images to The Economist, The New York Times, Esquire and Forbes, but it’s his collaboration with well-known broadcaster and poet Ian McMillan that has drawn art-world attention. They work together: McMillan writes a poem and Martin dreams up imagery to match it, or vice versa. The pair have teamed up on several delightful short films, a book and an Instagram.
“I have found that Instagram works really well for me as a motivational space,” Martin tells PureHoney. “I’m able to produce work and get immediate feedback, good or otherwise! It’s been a real blast, and looking back, it really helped me develop some new ways of working.”
Martin has been in the game for a long time, starting his career in the 1970s in London, painting corridors at the historic Rainbow Theatre, where legends such as Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd and David Bowie performed.
“I was lucky that the start of my arts profession coincided with the first wave of the punk DIY ethos, so obstacles were there to be kicked over, and closed doors kicked open,” he says. “You know, before the spiky hair and mohawks. There was a do-it-yourself vibe, which gave everyone an impetus to go out and grab it.”
NME 1983
“A lot of people have settled on a formulaic ambition route these days, which is a dangerous one,” he adds. “I think you can live by your wits more readily. You don’t need a template for it.”
As a child he collected “obsessively,” he recalls — “Wrappers, cartons, graphics, litter, even!” He later stumbled on to the scrapbooks of Scottish artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi and recognized a kindred spirit. “Just seeing how this material could inform an artist’s image-making was a huge moment for me,” Martin says. “This coincided with the DIY spirit of the mid-‘70s, and it soon became my medium of choice.
“I often thought about my maternal grandmother’s adage, ‘Cheek beats scholarship,’ to remember to stay open to opportunities and take chances whenever they arose,” he says.
Martin worked as arts editor for the British music and culture magazine NME, designed posters for skateboard mag Kung Fu Monthly and for Omnibus Press books on the histories of The Clash, Talking Heads and The Pretenders.
“The common thread through media usage is the idea,” Martin says. “The idea is the main ingredient; the medium you choose to articulate that idea is often arbitrary. Sometimes, I produce a collage as a starting point and then move on to another means of mark-making for the final result. It’s like rehearsing in collage.”
Martin spent the ‘80s and ‘90s combining his passion for design and illustration by setting up his own studio, Studio Espresso. During these halcyon years, he designed the poster for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ICA London exhibition, was loaned the first Apple Macintosh computer as part of Apple’s drive to promote technology among artists, and devised the graphics for the pre-launch of Britain’s newspaper The Independent.
“I had a few years of experimenting with digital animation in the 2000s when the tools first became affordable,” he says. “I did a couple of big gigs, one for the Rolling Stones’ Bigger Bang tour and some projections for Oasis when they played Glastonbury. These were produced with LED lights, so in terms of resolution, they were pretty crude, and I found the process at the time unsatisfactory. After some time trying to progress in the field, I realized how much happier I was interpreting written ideas onto the page.”
Which brings us to his pet project with McMillan. “The poet I collaborate with shares a similar working mode, juxtaposing and shaking new meanings from familiar language,” Martin says. “He has a keen visual eye so we work very well in that regard. We also share a sense of the absurd, which always helps.”
“Apart from this, collage is such a flexible and playful medium that just moving images around can actually produce a kind of visual poetry. When you’re playing with collage elements, they will form poetry themselves.”
Find Andy Martin at andymartin.gallery and @thatandymartin @mcmillan_and_martin on Instagram ~ Kelli Bodle
