Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Martin evidently had painted a lot of very good landscapes when he met Catherine.
Dwight, Martin’s psychologist, was obviously concerned about Martin’s mental health. That may have reduced his ability to view the paintings as entirely new pieces of work. He’d implied that Martin had simply tacked in a few dump trucks and front-end loaders to win Catherine’s favor, to make the landscapes into political art in opposition to the Raven coal mine going in on Vancouver Island. But that wasn’t the case. Martin had aimed higher and created something profound. Nadine gently touched the surface of new section of the painting. She inhaled quickly, involuntarily. It was smooth and cool, almost like skin. Martin had sanded the paint off the side of the mountain, scraped it from a section of the beach—right down to raw canvas. Under several layers of atmospheric clear washes, he’d outlined what was meant to be the infrastructure of the coal mine in the newly excavated side of the mountain. Poisons leaked into the sea—what had been the foreground of the painting, was now evidence of an uncontained atrocity.
The new areas had been built up with what must have been encaustic wax poured and left as a sort of raised blobs that had been scratched and carved into with something like a pencil, leaving rounded troughs, lacerations he’d filled with blood-red paint. Where he had hoped to create opposition to a mining venture on the brink of causing catastrophic results to the shellfish industry and untold—and even unknown—environmental fall-out, Martin had created something incredibly beautiful.
What stood in place of the political intention it lacked was the absolute truth of its creation. It was a more than masterful failure. He’d done it to impress a woman for the specific purpose of using her emotions as narcissistic supply. Basically, a form of pure evil. Martin had been completely unsuccessful in, and likely incapable of, empathizing with Catherine’s concerns, her passion or the intensity of her focus on stopping the mine.
