John Martin

Macbeth, 1820, oil on canvas, 86 x 65 cm

Pandemonium, 1841, oil on canvas, 123 x 184 cm

The Evening of the Deluge, 1828, mezzotint and engraving, 60 x 82 cm

The Great Day of His Wrath, 1851-1853, oil paint on canvas, 196 x 303 cm

The Last Judgement, 1853, oil on canvas, 197 x 326 cm

I find myself constantly referring to the paintings of John Martin as I believe they are an excellent example of how to arrest your audience through wonderment and awe. The first painting I ever saw by Martin was his Macbeth, and I remember feeling breathless by seeing it expanded to fit a lecture hall screen with its fantastical cloud formations and the utter dwarfing of human existence. It was these qualities that first interested me in studying his imagery, and it was not until later that I realised Martin had in fact dealt with apocalyptic imagery directly through his series of illustrations for Milton's Paradise Lost. Though Martin's paintings are inarguably exaggerated, I can't help but love his theatrical spaces, nightmarish lighting effects and ominous colour palettes. According to Romanticism by Norbert Wolf (Taschen, Germany, 2007), Pandemonium refers to a passage in the first book of Paradise Lost which states "Pandemonium, the palace of Satan, rises suddenly built out of the deep", and features what is described as a "hybrid administration building in a totalitarian state" (p. 80). Martin also depicted eruptions and deluges, continuing with this thematic exploration. Even though Martin's landscapes are mostly unrealistic, I love how atmospheric they are, with strong touches of red and yellow amongst the greys, blues and browns foreshadowing impending doom. I think this draws the viewer into the painting really effectively as we wonder what has preceded the still of the narrative, and imagine what is going to happen next. Even though the human figures are miniaturised, I feel that we care for them as individuals and emphasise with their battle against the raw forces of nature.

I find Martin's work really inspiring towards making work with a narrative basis through borrowing stories from history, the present, and even constructed from my imagination. These paintings also conjure for me ideas of an entity compressed into a single frame, which I think links to the same ideas of a landscape within a diorama that I am experimenting with in my current work.