A eulogy for Martin Sharp

Our ways of writing and speaking about the dead are many. To give a eulogy is to speak in praise of someone who no longer lives; it is to speak ardently, but also forgetfully, the poorer parts of a person condemned to a big black hole. An elegy is mournful; a plaintive poem whose rhythm, quiet and unhurried, emulates a heartbeat as it slows, then pauses, before ceasing altogether. A lament is a guttural cry springing savagely from the body like an untamed animal, and which, even on release, leaves an iron lump in the heart and a taught knot in the throat.

What is it to consider the life of another? And what is it to consider their death? It is to hold that person in your mind, and to turn them over, so their pockets are emptied of gold and silver coins; bus passes, film tickets, a piece of chalk, a handkerchief. Perhaps a carton of cigarettes, a note penned in curlicue script, or a small stone, held and rotated by its old guardian between thumb and forefinger as a talisman or charm. It is to hear the passage of these things as they clink and chink and rattle to the floor, an uneasy tune that stops as suddenly as it starts. To contemplate another person’s life and their inexorable death is to gather up these bits and pieces from the fleshy grey folds of one’s mind, and to resurrect them, to fashion from them a collage of sorts, a picture that has no literal semblance to the person who lived, but which speaks more eloquently of their life, their real life, their day-to-day quotidian life, a life, perhaps, about which little was known; for a person’s terms of reference for knowing another are often the brief responses made to bright but empty salutations: hello, good-morning, sleep tight, farewell.

Martin Sharp was born on January 21st 1942 in Sydney’s privileged Bellevue Hill –  the same day on which the president of the Jewish world congress opened a letter from detainees of the Warsaw ghetto detailing their unspeakable treatment; the same day on which the Bronx magistrate court ruled pinball machines illegal; and the same day upon which Count Basie, the African American pianist whose fingers flew like a bird over the ivory keys of his instrument, recorded his famous tune, the One o’clock jump. In a way it makes sense that Sharp’s birth was bookended by events both tragic and whimsical, for these qualities defined much of the work he went on to produce.

As a small boy, Martin Sharp took to art like a duck to water. In a rare radio interview with Sean O’Brien in 2006, he picks back over his life, trying to pinpoint the moment at which he became aware of his calling. To the interviewer he describes a small collage, formed from drawings and cartoons made by his grandfather and mother, cobbled together in his early youth with glue-paste and brush. Of collage he would later say, ‘I could put a Gauguin figure in a Van Gogh landscape, make the composition work, and also say something about their relationship.’ For Sharp, collage was no mere flight of fancy in which disparate items were jammed together in a chance operation. Rather, the act of drawing articles together was to marry them physically and conceptually, to say something of note that could not otherwise be apprehended.

Collage was key and with it, he made connections between things where relationships had not previously been perceived. He turned junk shop items into treasure troves, regarding a ratty scrap of crepe paper as akin to a precious ruby. This latter attribute signals another of Sharp’s talents: he was a Peter Pan of sorts, one who never lost the ability to look at things as a child does–with awe, not apathy.

As a teenager Sharp was given his first art prize by the painter Justin O’Brien. The trophy was a book on Vincent Van Gogh, in whom Sharp discovered a kindred spirit. For Van Gogh too, saw the world as did few others, sensing each movement of the wind as a winding path within the sky and regarding the opening of each sunflower as a joyous birth.

From then on, Vincent Van Gogh was Sharp’s absent muse. He made copies of the elder artist’s paintings, and collages, some of which were published in his ART BOOK of 1972. After time spent in London during which Sharp made posters, wrote song lyrics, and worked on the inimitable pop magazine OZ, he established, back in Sydney, The Yellow House: a gallery, installation piece and artist-space named after the rooms in which Van Gogh and Gauguin had worked together in Provence in 1888.

In this work, Vincent, Sharp claims the artist not only as muse but as confidant and friend, referring to him by given name alone. And with his psychedelic sensibility, Sharp sets to work portraying the brilliant but unsettled mind of Van Gogh, as a party-popper explosion of yellow streamers that connote, of course, the trembling sunflowers of his paintings, whose petals spark and flicker as though driven by a thousand tiny hearts.

Set within the poster are lines from a letter written by Van Gogh to his brother Theo in which he states: ‘I have a terrible lucidity at moments, when nature is so glorious[;] in those days I am hardly conscious of myself and the picture seems to come to me like in a dream.’ For Van Gogh, to see the word with such startling clarity was a blessing and a curse. To apprehend the opening of each flower meant he would witness an equal number of deaths, regarding each as an arrow to the heart. For Van Gogh the experience of living in the world was too extreme to bear and he ended his time within it at the age of 37, his last words, ‘that sadness will last forever’.

Seven years after Van Gogh’s death, another artist, Oscar Wilde, mused on the nature of sadness while locked in Reading Gaol. He wrote that sadness is the purest of all human emotions, for when one truly feels it, it is as though he will never feel anything else again. Martin Sharp understood this and he felt, keenly, the misfortunes of others. But just as he saw beauty in unexpected places he recognised purity in a multitude of earthly phenomena. One of these was in music, its sole purpose to issue its singular sound, lasting only for a moment before vanishing, forever.

In 1965 Martin Sharp rolled up to the Royal Albert Hall to hear the American performer Tiny Tim, a kooky impresario who sang old show tunes and down and out anthems in eye-popping, head-splitting, falsetto soprano. From the moment the singer opened his lips, to the time his voice swirled and eddied in the plasterwork ceiling, to the point at which his song fell silently as confetti to a floor, Martin Sharp was hooked. He had found a new hero, one whose voice was as pure as Van Gogh’s vision.  

As Richard Neville, Sharp’s friend later wrote, Tiny Tim thence became a lifelong obsession, the subject of Sharp’s portraits and the soundtrack to his life. During the following years Sharp devoted countless hours to Tiny, filming him as he drove around town, read the newspaper and preached on the merits of music, and love while riding the Big Dipper at Sydney’s Luna Park. Theirs was a strange pairing, perhaps, but as others remarked, they were parallel spirits, both collagists of a kind, taking elements of different epochs and turning them afresh, as sugar crystals into wisps of cotton candy.

In 1973 Martin Sharp got a chance to work on his biggest project yet. He was to fix up Luna Park, by then a bit frayed around the edges, having played host to scraped knees and joyrides and rough and tumble love affairs for near on forty years. With a band of artist helpers, he was to start with her face and go to her heart, bringing the old girl back to her former glory, the glamorous foil to the cool elegance of the opera house on the other side of the shore.

But raising someone from the dead isn’t often an easy job. Of this the artist wrote in an article for Quadrant magazine –

Many were the voyages of discovery we took down tunnels and maze-ways seeking lost souls and secrets of the carnival. [We were stretcher] bearers bringing the wounded and dying back to our first aid tent. Sometimes we met with success and could help an old trooper back to drink from the fountain of youth. Often, alas, we arrived too late. The sinister trucks had already rumbled their irreversible journey to the junkyard. It’s a fine line between treasure and rubbish. What and who [one chooses] to save from the passing parade.

As the park was salvaged, new paint applied, new rides, new bells and whistles strung up, there were, Sharp later said, signals that all was not quite right. A sense of disquiet, a shadow glimpsed, the footfall of an unseen figure that makes one wish they’d not so desperately willed a loved one back to life – for 1979 was to be Martin Sharp’s annus horibilis and its stage, the sandy plot of Luna Park.

Ginger Meggs sings mammy at the school concert was made to commemorate Tiny Tim’s world-non-stop-professional-singing-record, held at the park on the evening of January 12.  But as Tiny’s voice travelled over the harbour and into the night, a bell tolled. And its song, neither clear nor cool but dull and irrevocable, seemed to signal, for Martin, something significant. Not a birth, or a marriage, but a death. 

And like clockwork, death struck.  On June 9, it donned a paper-mache mask, stalked toward the ghost train, and struck a match. A school teacher, Mr Godson, and his six pupils perished, plumes of smoke closing in on them as quickly as storm clouds over sea.

For Sharp, to whom everything meant something, the event was not only a terrible accident but akin to the second coming of Christ; an apocalyptic moment that signalled just how terrible the world could really be. Several years later, in 1987 he painted the portraits of the victims. Made in the form of a crucifix, the work was titled Golgotha, meaning the place of the skull, and the stony mound on which Christ was killed.

The work is among Sharp’s lesser-known works, but this has less to do with its merit than of the ways in which our secular society shies from religion; fearing its fundamentalisms, flinching at the store it sets in faith, recoiling from rituals deemed ostentatious and archaic. Make of it what you will, but undeniable is the intermittent beauty of the Bible, that glimmers like gold through its wafer-thin pages, appearing as poems and stories to which countless authors and artists, poets and painters have attended as they set out to make their mark upon the world.

One such artist was Arthur Stace, born down-at-heel in Redfern in 1884. Unlike Sharp, who was cared for in his youth, Arthur Stace was raised in poverty and made a ward of the state by the age of twelve. As a teenager, then an adult, Stace’s life was less than gloomy; a drunk and itinerant, his path to ruin seemed certain. But in 1930 he heard the evangelist John Ridley state his wish to cry ‘Eternity!’ throughout Sydney’s streets.

Inspired, Stace took up a piece of yellow chalk and wrote the word ‘Eternity’ upon the black breast of the sidewalk. He did so another 500,000 times, at least, throughout his life; from Martin Place, Parramatta, Kings Cross and down along the water to the shores of Rose Bay, where Martin Sharp first came across a copy as a boy. His eyes grew wide and a sense of wonder whirred in his bright young mind at the strange inscription on the street. As he later said to Rachel Kohn – ‘Stace was surely one of Australia’s greatest writers. He wrote so simply, just one word, but it said everything, and on the pavements, not in books… it was very interesting, very original.’

Eternity was made by Sharp in 1990 in remembrance of the life of Arthur Stace. But rather than laying Stace’s yellow catchcry on the street, Sharp sets it in the sky and crowns it with a swathe of shining stars. Now safe from street sweepers, dog walkers and the clatter of high heels, Stace’s precept holds fast in the art of Martin Sharp, and the meaning of this word, somehow both clear and arcane, can be pondered at will.

Eternity. It seems straightforward enough at first. Eternity is forever. But what is forever, what binds it, what makes it, how can ‘forever’ be contained within the confine of a word, and can it really be a state one enters after washing one’s hands of life? These are age-old questions and ones rarely answered satisfactorily. For despite all our cleverness and cockiness there are certain things we can never know. For Arthur Stace and Martin Sharp, this fact wasn’t one to be lamented. For them, it was the mysteries of life that made it seem all the richer; they were the cream in the coffee, the meat in the sandwich, the glass of beer at the end of the day that trickles and bubbles down the throat and brings one, finally, to sleep.

Martin Sharp died at his Bellevue home on the first of December 2013. Could he feel the onset of death as the breath left his body, or did death wash over him coolly and calmly, like a wave? Was it a nightmare, or a dream, or was it both of these things at once, welling up inside him like a flood? One can only guess. But whatever it was, Martin Sharp’s death, if it was anything like his life, would not have been typical.

At his funeral his friends covered his coffin with sunflowers and inscribed ‘Eternity’ on the street outside the Church. And the words of the writer, Roger McGough, whose work Sharp had known in his youth later hung about the rafters like the faint scent of wax and incense, in the form of a poem that goes like this:

Let me die a youngman's death/ not a clean and inbetween/ the sheets holywater death/ not a famous-last-words/ peaceful out of breath death … Let me die a youngman's death/ not a free from sin tiptoe in/ candle wax and waning death/ not a curtains drawn by angels borne/ 'what a nice way to go' death