The Thousands

The funny thing about Marty’s work is that initially, it seems like a big mess. Shit is everywhere, it’s hard to make out what is what, and, although it is indisputably impressive, you wonder if it is anything more than the unedited spewings of a crazy person with a lifetime subscription to Mad Magazine.

Skull Gully is a collection of large-scale, insanely detailed landscape studies, drawn onsite around an imaginary but very real western mining town where the artist lives. Marty gives as much credence to the imaginary world as to the drudgery of reality, weaving visual gatecrashers like Transformer toys, ice-cream cones and comic book characters in with the aggressive Australian flora. Layering inspiration in a completely original, celebratory manner, he takes visual pointers from 18th century French fabric decorative art Toile de Jouy, the world’s first engineer, Vitruvius, Roman artist of imagined prisons Piranesi, as well as Melbourne landscape painter Arthur Streeton.

It’s all quite broad and frankly a bit of a head fuck, but if you relax and just let the whole thing soak into your brain, it all makes perfect, ridiculous sense. Every single piece of the puzzle is considered, every element a key player in Marty’s wonderful imagination/reality.