Archive
Martyn Cross
My Assembled Selves
02.09.2023 – 05.11.2023
On a crisp January evening, Virgina Woolf recounts a sunset drive she took across the coast of East Sussex. Gliding through Eastbourne, Bexhill and St Leonards, she marvels at the ‘freckles of red villas’, ‘the pink clouds over Battle’ and the ‘mottled and marbled fields’ she encounters. She tenderly anthropomorphises the awkward contours of this coastline and concocts a series of imaginative scenarios of this landscape across past, present and future. A series of selves accompanies her during this drive. Some are gleeful, others ravenous, whilst a dominant self is particularly saddened by the fleeting beauty of this precious moment. As if riotously playing a concertina composed of historical, ecological and personal elements, this short essay mirrors the temporal elasticity and imagination of Cross’s work presented at Flatland. He too uses Sussex as an arena to host a meeting of his assembled selves.
Swelling clouds, aged turf and morphing figures populate the paintings and drawings of Martyn Cross. In a similar vein to Woolf’s Evening Over Sussex, personal, elemental and historic fragments assemble together, crafting a series of works which are untethered to any singular era, person or place. Anatomical and terrestrial matter is submerged in a celestial veil, as divisions between the eternal and the ephemeral are diluted by Cross. Witnessed collectively, a sense of estranged self-portraiture emerges from this engrossing brew. Like encountering depictions of untold legends, each work possesses distinct sensorial kernels— even if the tableaux presented to us are unfamiliar or strange.
Each painting evolves through sessions of instantaneous drawing, where the artist will “take his imagination for a walk”. Never working from direct observation, the forms and vistas within these sketches are intuitively fashioned by Cross. An ongoing fascination with archaeology, ecclesiastical design and medievalwall painting undeniably infuses the aesthetics of Cross’s visual vocabulary. Having worked as a bookseller alongside his art practice for 20 years, an immense adoration and respect for storytelling also feeds into the work. The influence of authors such as Russel Hoban, or artists such as Forest Bess, William Blake and Cecil Collins feels present, yet the realm cultivated by Cross is entirely his own. Selecting drawings which capture his attention, Cross begins the process of transferring these original sketches onto canvas, aiming to retain their uninhibited character. This is not always an easy translation however, as paint brings its own sense of agency to this transition.
Navigating this loss of control, the paintings develop over several weeks as Cross sits with intricacies of colour, composition, texture and scale. The tonal qualities of the work’s palette may dictate novel energies, or the shift in scale may shuffle the drawing’s initial layout. Seasonal hues outside the studio inform these decisions, as might a particular text or memory.
During this developmental stage, layers of pigment are added and worn away by Cross. Using a blunted knife as his primary tool, mottled textures emerge on the canvas as pigments are muddled. As if unearthing aged artefacts or undiscovered frescoes, this process gifts each work a sense of time far deeper than its nascent reality. Through this series of interactions between Cross and each painting, new works slowly come into being, bearing traces of this fluid dynamic. Perhaps this symbiosis is partly responsible for the works’ sense of timelessness, as they develop collaboratively from a hybrid of masters; Cross’s intuition, paint itself and a divergent host of source materials.
Cross continually draws from a transcendental pool of imagery which traverses spheres of anatomy and nature. Enlarged hands, magnetic horizon lines, curious eyes and rippling suns collide across Cross’s canvases, as these biological markers puncture the undying cycles of seas, suns and moons. Bodily elementsrupture these eternal rhythms, inviting the human form to join these elongated streams of time. In Tomb for Immortal Ascension, four gargantuan legs drop out of a beady eyed cloud, as if racing across the field below. In Flodan Blaed, the bones of a skeleton form into feathery tendrils in the earth, like ancient tree roots taking hold. Or in A Purifying Furnace, a nebulous tree erupts from the lips of a peaceful giant.
In his 1864 account of the forests of Maine, Henry David Thoreau comments on the attraction of the ‘unhandled globe’, of an Earth ‘made out of Chaos and Old Night’, ‘no man’s garden’, but the ‘fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made for ever and ever’. Within his paintings and drawings, Cross echoes this sense of enchantment that Thoreau experiences. His works emulate the magic of encountering environments that have remained untouched since their inception on this planet, or the bewilderment of witnessing celestial entities making their home in our ‘Old Night’ skies. The aqueous union between corporal fragments and sublime habitats in Cross’s work revels in this sense of wonder, slipping wholeheartedly into a more porous relationship between ecology, the self and deep time.
Aside from basking in the divinity of nature, another key aesthetic and tonal strand in Cross’s work is the influence of medieval wall painting. Also referred to as the Biblia Pauperum, or Poor Man’s Bible, these painted scenes in Churches displayed pivotal moments from the Bible to largely illiterate congregations in the Middle Ages. Similarly to the distinct graphic glossary within Cross’s paintings, specific hand gestures held particular symbolic weight in these displays. Medieval scholar, E. Clive Rouse explains that ‘Judgement was indicated by the open palm, Condemnation by the single finger pointing. Two fingers denoted Power- often the Manus Dei or Hand of God emerging from a cloud’. This heightened focus on morality is not present within Cross’s work. Languid fingers emerging from their elemental cocoons don’t seem to be passing judgement, or instructing ‘correct’ behaviours,yet this sense of transference does feel present within the work. No singular treatise is communicated, but each work has the capacity to ignite distinct emotions with viewers.
Cross has spoken in fact about his curiousness in witnessing the different ways his works take hold with audiences. Some latch onto the gothic, eerie undertones lurking in the gnarled branches or moonlit shadows, whilst others find humour in their puckish imagery. The titles bestowed to each piece lean further into this tonal ambiguity. ‘Double Yolker’ brings a light-hearted lens to an enrapturing image of twin suns. Whilst titles such as ‘A Tomb for Immortal Ascension’ and ‘A Purifying Furnace’ hold weightier tones, folding grander themes of mortality and morality into their phantasmal tableaux. The hybrid visual vocabulary between cartoony, illustrative figures and ethereal landscapes further muddies this mix. Cues from colour palettes, language, scale and imagery can easily lead viewers down disparate paths. It’s unclear where the emotional crux of each work resides.
This uncertainty however is what makes each work so rousing. Firmly situated in plurality, literary, art-historical and spiritual source materials converge and commune within Cross’s work. Familiar images or narratives are reacquainted within unfamiliar settings. This continual shuffling and reimagining of mythology, ecology and history produces a fascinating marinade for Cross to work with. In a world where culture is constantly geared towards absolutes and linearity, it’s a pleasure to get lost within Cross’s painterly riddles.
Fran Painter-Fleming
i Virginia Woolf, ‘Evening Over Sussex’ within The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London, Penguin, 1961). pg. 13.
ii Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), p. 78.
iii E. Clive Rouse, Medieval Wall Paintings (Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications Ltd, 1991), p. 16.