Jeff Martin was born in Redcliffe, Queensland in 1967. He and his family moved often, from Queensland to New South Wales in the late 60s, Papua New Guinea from 1970 to 1976, eventually settling in Melbourne in 1981. In the late 80s Martin left school to work as a junior in an advertising agency but his career came to an abrupt end with the stock market crash of 1987.
Turning to the hospitality industry, Martin took a job washing dishes in an exclusive Melbourne restaurant and was quickly promoted up the ranks. For the next 17 years he was involved in Melbourne’s restaurant industry as a waiter, cook and eventually as the owner of a small restaurant. Remaining disciplined to his creative passions throughout this period, Martin did life drawing, undertook small design projects, worked on consignment and sold a number of works privately. In 1999 Martin met his wife Caroline, whose family had strong connections to the arts community of Melbourne, and she encouraged his creative skills and convinced him to travel with her to Italy.
It was on this four month vacation in 1999 that Martin came across, and fell in love with, the island of Favignana located on the northwest coast of Sicily.
Initially inspired by Favignana’s noble fishermen, Martin painted sketched and photographed these men going about their daily ritual of supplying the small population with small fish. He remained unaware at this time that Favignana was home to the legendary Mattanza.
La Mattanza (interpreted locally as 'The Death Trap’) is the name of a fishing ritual that has been passed down from generation to generation for centuries. It is the catching of migrating tuna using hundreds of miles of nets, which funnel the tuna into a large trap. The net, when full of tuna, is surrounded by barges and then slowly raised towards the surface. Calm water becomes a fury and men, using handcarved timber-segmented poles with a metal gaff, pull these giant fish into the barges. It takes at least eight big men to retrieve one fish and the largest tuna on record weighed in at over one tonne. So important was this ancient ritual of fishing to the economy of Italy, that the island of Favignana had electricity before Rome.
It was these men and this ritual that became the inspiration for Martin’s first solo show. Martin returned to Favignana in 2001 and again in 2003, self-funding each journey by working in Melbourne restaurants.
It was during this last journey in 2003 that Martin realised this was more than just an interesting community to observe and paint. He says: “It was a community coping with both physical and emotional change, with global warming, over-fishing for new markets and poaching by foreign fleets. The fishermen of Favignana were facing a social crisis and the brutal Mattanza would soon be a thing of the past, leaving its community looking to new forms of income. The proud and noble fishermen of the Mattanza, who captured my intrigue at the outset, would have to redefine themselves. This is a crisis of global proportions realised on the faces of a few men and I am visually recording the historical and cultural changing of a small community in my work.”
Martin Kantor of Melbourne’s Brightspace Gallery offered Martin his first solo exhibition which opened in October 2004. The sell-out show featured over 30 original works and was titled 'FROM FAVIGNANA’. This generally figurative body of work continued to be the focus of Martin’s paintings until early 2006. It has now become known as 'The Favignana Series’ and is held in private collections in London, Rome, Sicily, Sweden and throughout Australia and New Zealand. 'The Favignana Series’ spanning from 1999 to 2006, was based on the observations of a small fishing community and the environment that defined them. In early 2006, Martin began to explore the environment that defined him. He started with two simple questions, “How did I become who I am?” and “Why must I create?”
Says Martin, “This process of many months eventually lead back to those formative school years where we are all moulded for our role in society. I attended more than my fair share of educational institutions and saw school as a constant, unexplained obstacle in my path to something else. As a child, I was an observer. Obviously an asset to any artist, but at the time it was more of a survival technique, as I was constantly assessing and adapting to new environments due to the family’s movements. I don’t have an issue with this, what I lost in educational continuity I gained in adaptation skills and I am very fortunate that I am now able do what I love and in this series I am celebrating that”.
In this current body of work referred to as 'The Wall Series’, the wall stands fast, solid and impenetrable and is a constant in every piece. For Martin it represents the strength of the unyielding institution, however the use of light indicates that there is a way around it. It (the light) has been referred to by observers as representing hope and destiny. The children in Martin’s paintings fall under the shadows of the wall but are oblivious to it’s presence. They serve to date the work and each figure is derived from a childhood memory, but it is the wall, not the children, that is the focus point of the work. The communal drinking trough is the other constant image in every work. It is an evocative image and identifies the environment as school.
Martin did not use any models or photographs as reference for this work as he felt it important to capture the emotion of his memories without the distraction of any specific visual reference.
'The Wall Series’ was first shown to the public in early March of 2007 in a 34 piece solo exhibition at Kozminsky Gallery in Melbourne. The exhibition sold out and new works from this series were taken to Art Sydney by United Galleries.
In 2008 Martin exhibited with Gould Galleries Melbourne as part of the 2008 Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.
- Writers:
- Martin, Jeff
- Date written:
- 2008
- Last updated:
- 2011
