Stimmen

Angela Eames, Peinture Interrompu – 2014

Keeping it simple…
Keep it simple and straightforward.

The KISS principle maintains that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated; therefore simplicity should be a key goal in design and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

Martin Potts grew up in Yorkshire and after a year’s study at Leeds College of Art he moved south to study Painting at Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, then to The Slade School of Art in London and finally to The British School in Rome. On completion of his Rome Scholarship he travelled to New York and set up his first studio in Soho and painted.

It is in the painting. In each considered painted stroke. Born perhaps of his childhood spent on a farm attending to the regular, daily and seasonal labour incurred in a farming life. Martin’s rigorous approach to life and work, his love of the order of numbers and matter and his embracing of individual restraint were apparent as a student. One bowl, one plate, one set of cutlery and a mug. These were all that were needed as peripheral to the activity of painting. Brushes offered the exception – he had many. With paint he was resourceful. Materials such as wooden pallets, old doors, planking and sheet board were to be found all around him and allowed for risk and experimentation within his working approach – little changed down the years as he literally walked a painter’s path through life.

The disciplined activity of painting underpinned Martin the artist. There was care in each and every step taken, preliminary drawings, material acquisition and brush strokes made. There were also moments of silence and contemplation as content married with visual possibility informed his next move, his next painting. Whether raw materials found on New York streets or the contemporary industrial sheet materials of the building trade, all were employed in a straightforward and entirely appropriate manner in the manifestation of the painted image. Colour was crucial. Painting space was explored. Content was humanity.

Simplicity does not mean the provision only of essential features nor does it mean lacking in sophistication. Simplicity is not a position of compromise; rather it’s a position of strength and this was exemplified in Martin’s work. His references were the sounds and sights of his environment. Music was ever-present, particularly Olivier Messiaen, whose music I first heard Martin playing on the venerable Dansette record player in the painting studio at Corsham. Messiaen, Steve Reich and Erik Satie were accompanied by the open spaces of Wiltshire, the sunlight of Italy, the compacted architectural fissures of London and New York and the monotonous skies of Muenster. An instinctive need for purposeless play and an enquiring mind drove his painting activity. He relished the seemingly chaotic visual stimuli of his surroundings wherever he walked and he walked everywhere. He allowed them to challenge his daily thought patterns and then later following the inevitable process of reflection and elimination, he would set about the business of making and breaking in the studio. Excitement and eagerness were tempered by the demanding task of reduction and the pursuit of clarity through his attention to use of material, paint and not least system. His was the practice of getting it right, getting it to work, reaching the point where the painting existed in its own right.

It was reverence for simplicity and system which attracted him to the work of Messiaen. Vingt Regards Sur L’Enfant Jésus is composed according to a rigorously algebraic structure and by adding or subtracting fragments of note values, Messiaen allows for a distortion of metre. This systematic approach is echoed in ‘The Adorations’. Messaien’s text, in its glyphic interpretation, literally bounces back and forth within the picture plane. In appearance and disappearance the viewer is allowed glimpses of text within colour and space, an alternate enactment of meaning.