My friend Paul Martin, who has died aged 73 of pancreatic cancer, was a painter whose work was rooted in nature: preoccupied by the “scratchy, tough reality of things”. But his locations, and the figures which sometimes peopled them, were more metaphorical than representational: familiar but also otherworldly.
Born in Bournemouth, Paul was the son of Alice (nee Moland), a secretary, and John Martin, a hydro-electric engineer, who died when Paul was 10. Paul grew up in Rugby, Warwickshire, and went to Dunsmore school, where he excelled at sport, leading a national schoolboy gymnastics team on a tour of Austria in 1964. He also joined an early incarnation of the Rugby-based pop band, Pinkerton’s Assorted Colours, as its drummer – without him, they went on to score an unlikely Top 10 hit with Mirror, Mirror in 1966.
