Monday, January 24, 2011

Dan Martelock’s whimsical-yet-grim drawings and paintings sit in an in-between place that is at once delightful and dreadful. Cute little birds wear Nazi helmets, lovely young headless ladies smell flowers, grumpy old men converse with toilet paper rolls that have sprouted arms and legs. And so on.

There’s a rather large showing of these small but engaging and paradoxical works exhibited at Shanghai Restaurant (651 Somerset West) until the end of February. To get a better sense of what moves Martelock artistically, we conducted a brief Q&A.

I love birds and nature and drawing them is fun to do. I particularly like to draw the smaller birds wearing things that are not the norm, like flight goggles or a helmet, to give them the appearance of being almost human.

You do some of the smaller pieces on the bus to work?

I have always sketched on the bus as this is my favourite way to pass time, I have been drawing on the bus for over 20 years now. I have been told many times that my sketch work is much better than my painting, so for this show I thought it would be interesting to see what the public thought about the sketch work as opposed to my painting work. I believe it was successful.

Why do you draw on cardboard?

It looks like cardboard, but it is in fact 1/8” masonite board. I work for a kitchen design and installation company and kitchen companies go through a lot of waste. If there is a 10”x10” piece left from cutting, I will take it home and paint on it.

Your illustrations have a darkness to them but they don't have the extreme menace or violence that a lot contemporary illustration has. What is the emotional tone that you are trying to convey?

I like the dark “look” to a lot of paintings and the graffiti edge they seem to portray. I used to do a lot of graffiti, but then realized that it usually gets covered up and all that work is then wasted. I tried to give it that dark look so that people feel intrigued to look closer at my work, only to find out that it is actually a comedic piece where a man is talking with a roll of toilet paper, or a cute little bird is looking out from its giant mechanical house at the landscape. So I guess you could say I do it for the impact and the darker graffiti look that I love so very much.

When you draw people, you usually have them in gas masks or without heads. What's going on there?

I had done a painting series long ago where I had painted children with no heads doing mindless things that children used to do for fun, like playing with a ball, hopscotch, skipping rope, or smelling a flower. I basically painted mindless kids doing mindless things. In the same mindless series I had painted children playing everyday games outside wearing gasmasks, so it was an environmental question being asked in my art: “what kind of air are we leaving for our kids to breathe?” I have been portraying small sparrow birds wearing gas masks as they will be the first ones affected by the air we are destroying daily.

Is your illustrated world one where animals and inanimate objects with legs take over the planet?

No, it is fun to think about, but no. I like making the birds and animals look equal to humanity. In some of my more recent pieces I have little men looking down at a robotic birdhouse to give it the scale that these mech-houses would be, and when I draw the houses on their own I often make them look as though these birds are the only living thing left on the planet. Birds don’t really care that we are here and they work and live around us and do their own thing and don’t have a multitude of people in society telling them what is right and what is wrong. The inanimate objects with legs and sometimes arms is just another take on the comedic side of my art and an exploration of how cool life would be if these things actually had arms and legs of their own. It sure would be great to call your toaster over with pre-made toast like you would your dog with your daily newspaper.