Interview with Martin Reid, at The EVAN Gallery in Penrith, by Polly Marix Evans – some time towards the end of August 2024.
Oof, this was always going to be a tricky one as I think Marty is really quite sensible and I also think that Marty thinks that Sarah (his wife and one of my best buddies) and I are really quite silly. He’s probably right, but there you go.
24 hours before the interview, Marty sent me a potted history of his life, from almost egg to the present day, so I was tempted to stay in bed and not bother to go chat with him after all as he’d pretty much done my job for me, but that would be rude, plus I love a visit to the gallery in Penrith to terrorise the other artists.
Martin Reid is the Mr Fix-It of EVAN. He fixes things that go wrong in the gallery – like the sliding door to the little office. He fixes things that go wrong with the newsletters and updates. He fixes the camera when the ghost mucks it about. He deals with finances and membership, branding and websites. He even turns my rambly Word documents into interviews that read well with nice photos in between the words. If you want anything done, Marty can probably fix it.
Initially he wasn’t one of the EVAN artists in the gallery when it first opened, he was Mr Fix-It, making things work behind the scenes and wanting the gallery to work and remain open – it’s not always easy to keep our heads above water as a relatively small co-operative organisation.
In fact, it’s only relatively recently that he’s begun practising as an artist.
Martin grew up in Whitley Bay in the North East, the second youngest of five children. His childhood involved lots of hands-on learning and making and mending. He was about 8 when he bought a bike for £2, some handlebars for 20p (they snapped because they were so rusty!) but all the tools in his dad’s garage were his for the using. He mended some ice skates, fixing the blades back on with bolts and resin over the bolts to stop them coming undone. His dad was very practical, he helped Marty to learn on the job.
He loved all the practical subjects at school: art, pottery, woodworking, metalwork, technical drawing. Sadly, he wasn’t encouraged to study art or other practical subjects, but persuaded to follow a more academic route.
He tells me he had no formal art training, but then tells me his dad was an amateur artist, as was his grandad, his sister and his eldest brother – so it’s obviously in the genes to want to make and create. We don’t all need a certificate with a number or a letter on it to prove we can make art.
The family moved to a small village on the west coast of Scotland when Martin was 15. He was a total ‘foreigner’ which was tough going. He left school at the first opportunity and trained to be an engineer at ICI, where he learnt, amongst other things, engine mechanics, metal fabrication, welding and machining.
But apprenticeships were being scrapped in the early 80s, and job opportunities for engineering were thin on the ground. Martin worked an array of jobs from machine cutter in a lampshade factory to mechanical fitter on a heritage project to restore an 18th Century water mill.
Redundancy provided him with the opportunity to set up a furniture painting business he’d been thinking about for a while, using various paint effects and hand-painted designs. With this came the learning curve of self-employment – from book keeping to marketing. Before the advent of personal computers, Marty studied advertising and design in books (I know! Real life books – so vintage!) and put together layouts for promotional material by hand with Letraset, photography and colour copying.
In 1991 Martin moved to Penrith – the furthest he’s ever lived from the sea – a full 40-minute drive!
He retrained in horticulture and IT at Newton Rigg College, and found he had a natural affinity with computers. He went on to teach IT to adults at the Newton Rigg Business Centre which led to various roles within Newton Rigg College/University of Central Lancashire/University of Cumbria – IT, desktop publishing, reprographics, design and advertising, web and development, course administration. I told you he was a man of many hats.
17 years after joining Newton Rigg he chose to accept the voluntary redundancy on offer and took the freelance plunge again. Immediately he found himself with a fair few clients, some of whom had been former colleagues, and a couple of days a week role as operations manager for a local paddlesport company.
In 1999 Martin met Sarah at the Haltwhistle Carnival. She was dressed as Peter Pan. In 2000 Martin met Sarah at the Haltwhistle Carnival again. This time she was dressed as a gypsy with a basket full of cans of beer. It was love! They chatted all night on the banks of the Tyne. They had so much in common. Marty had even been to the same school as Sarah’s tattooist! They shared a love of books, music and art. They went to galleries, exhibitions and workshops together. They got married in 2002 with Sarah wearing the most glorious dress!
Living with Sarah (yes, the Sarah Reid famous EVAN pastel artist) really rekindled Marty’s artistic passion. They’ve worked on paintings together, taking turns almost like that childhood game where you fold the top over and let the next person draw the next bit. One of these collaborations was entitled ‘Armageddon’ – apparently it hasn’t survived the years as well as the marriage of these two lovely people. A few more recent collaborations can be seen below.
But mainly they produce their art separately. Separately, but together, as they share a relatively small living area. Sarah has previously joked that Marty gets about 1 square metre of floor to himself! Do you know, I always thought Sarah was the ‘naughty hoarder’ but later on I learn that Marty is a late-night eBay-er, bidding on bizarre metal items like giant snails for his recently redesigned possibly-becoming-Penrith’s-first-sculpture-park garden. I suspect he hopes they’ll keep the real snails off his hostas. I can’t spell this plant name!!!
Martin has experimented with all manner of art techniques. His initial attempts at printmaking often left him disappointed, but then he used the actual plates, or foam board, as a canvas – a surface – applying the paint with the roller itself. This gave him a more naïve, gritty result that he really liked. (As a printmaker I can really relate to this – sometimes the plate can look almost better than the supposedly finished print you’ve just pulled from it!)
It was Sarah reading Hercules and the Farmer’s Wife by Chris Wadsworth, that led them on a trip to Castlegate House Gallery in Cockermouth. The Percy Kelly paintings literally blew them away! Though, without a spare £2500 kicking around, they couldn’t just buy the one they fancied. So Martin began experimenting, working in the style of Kelly. You can see Kelly’s influence in some of Sarah’s work too.
They both love spending time by the sea and often holiday in Allonby, though less often in a tent these days, more likely in the gloriously named Sea Glass Cottage.
Q8 oil drum spotted on Maryport harbour.
Cottage door down one of Allonby's back lanes.
Rusty wall fixing below Maryport promenade.
‘I like working with different media and materials. I’m interested in industrial art and the way the environment leaves its mark on metal, stone and wood. The way nature takes hold on man-made structures.’
And there’s plenty of this to see on the wild Cumbrian coast.
‘When I come up with a concept, I will use anything that I think will work in order to create it. Sometimes this involves being creative using unexpected materials, such as papier-mâché, wood, metal, resin, copper leaf, fishing line, cocktail sticks, bamboo, concrete, plaster of Paris, fabric, cardboard, wire – literally anything I can find.’
‘The Wrong Whale sculpture, for example, so named to highlight the barbaric nature of whaling (the Right Whales being a group of whale species that were easy to hunt and therefore the ‘right whales’ to hunt) was made from a piece of oak driftwood, complete with barnacles, skewered through the middle with a brutal looking harpoon made from a willow whip and papier-mâché. The rusty iron base is made from concrete, stained with rusted wire wool and paint.’
It surprises me then that Marty is also so happy with the computer side of things. He explains he enjoys the design part – websites for example – but not the pressure of designing on a non-stop design to demand and deadline nature, he finds that too much and is convinced working like that full time would lead to burnout. He likes to have time to think and plan. He tells me designing to a brief is always harder. It’s so much easier to come up with an idea and, hopefully, everyone will like it.
I ask him what he’d do if he won £10 million on the lottery (Sarah and I have been plotting to win a trip to Florence for some time – we like to dream – so much so that eventually a rather hurt looking Marty asked Sarah when we were going on this trip, I think he was a bit put out that she might not be taking him with her! She had to admit that A) we haven’t actually won it yet and B) we haven’t even entered any competitions, it’s just all a lovely big dream!)
He tells me he could never stop making. He just has that need to do something practical, the urge to create something long lasting.
You know I said I thought he was sensible? He jumps up to show me his most recent creation: the new, improved EVAN Darts Tournament trophy! Oh yes, sometimes we just gather a few of these crazy ol’ artists together with a cheese roll and a beer or a cuppa, and we throw darts vaguely in the vicinity of a dart board just for the fun of it! Some people take it much more seriously than others. Some discover they are better with their eyes shut. Anyway, Marty has crafted the most glorious trophy. An aged bronze goblet perches on a solid marble base, upon which a golden plaque with EVAN Darts Tournament is engraved. Actually, it’s a blob of wood painted to look like marble, upon which perches a painted clay cup whose stem was modelled using the cap of a bottle of mouthwash. I told you he was Mr Fix-It. But I was mistaken in thinking he was the sensible one! He’s only spent 30+ hours making a trophy for his equally silly artist friends! I hold it aloft and feel, for once, like I’ve won an Olympic medal!
