Barry Martin (born 1943) is a graduate of Goldsmith’s College and of St Martin’s School of Art, both especially influential in the 1960s when he was studying there. He has worked in various media – including kinetic sculpture, film, performance, and the making of environments – but the constant in his work has been drawing, either as a working tool, as a means of recording and observing, or as an end in itself. For Martin, drawing is a system of signs analogous to those of language, and also an intellectual process of enquiry, analysis and proposition.

This drawing, and another from the same series (E.321-2006), are self-portraits of the artist at Chiswick House (and are part of a larger series on this theme). Barry Martin has had a studio in the grounds of Chiswick House (now owned and managed by English Heritage) for the past 16 years, and is effectively ‘artist-in-residence’ in a very literal and established sense. Martin researched the aspects of Masonic symbolism which are incorporated into the house, hence the ‘collar’ he wears in one of these drawings, which is marked with Masonic emblems and signs. Both pictures feature aspects and views of the house, inside and out, combined in vertiginous perspectives; each is ambiguous, with images that can be interpreted as views, reflections or even manifestations of the artist’s imagination. Each is in black and white, densely worked and intense, creating a brooding surreal atmosphere.