“Whatever he paints or draws or etches or sculpts, he always starts by going - as Horace said of Homer and the other great epic poets - in medias res, into the middle of things. (It’s a strange experience to be painted by him - from the inside out, as it were.) And ‘things’ are always his subject: res, solid tangible reality; not abstract ideas, not his own take on how things might or ought to be. ‘There has to be a complete removal of all subjective thought,’ he wrote to me earlier this year, ‘and we both know who difficult that is to achieve.’ We do: in some ways, Martin’s figurative painting and my travel writing are sibling arts. We both aim to catch landscapes and portraits from the life. And yes, it is hard work, this trying to be faithful to reality in all its rawness and obscurity, to translate a diverse and elusive world rather than to invert an abstract or fictional one in the studio or study; this trying not just to see but always to look. The results, too, can make demands on the viewer or reader.”