How Columbia's Martin Pope channels life experience into fresh pursuit of painting

Temptation settles around Martin Pope’s paintings. You might attempt, at least once or twice, to read his compositions like stories or maps. Burning red as a main character here, deep blue tributaries crossing there, there and there.

Certainly the painter’s story stretches across pages of the American atlas, with personal legends and landmarks. A Columbia resident most of his childhood, Pope went west, young man, spending a decade as an actor, writer, director and comic in Hollywood.

And Pope gathered influences to himself, investing attention in pre-World War II comic strips; absorbing the atmosphere of clattery, smoke-filled newsrooms; shedding expectation during near-religious experiences before Rothko canvases; learning lessons about the self while sweating open mics around the greater Los Angeles area.

These people, places and things appear in Pope’s paintings, but implicitly and abstractly, through a process of paring creativity down to freedom and intuition.

"I don’t know if people can see any of this when they look at the paintings but, for me, it’s the most emotionally expressive work that I’ve done and the most vulnerable work that I’ve done," Pope said.

Just a few years after picking up a paintbrush, Pope’s work is multiplying its presence around Columbia, including in a solo exhibit at Orr Street Studios this month.

Roads to and from Columbia

Pope's family arrived in Columbia early in his childhood, his father taking a teaching position at the Missouri School of Journalism. The future artist attended Columbia schools through his high school graduation from Rock Bridge.

He experienced an initial knack for the visual arts, drawing "compulsively" as a kid, he said. But Pope surrendered to the theater's pull.

"When it sank in to me that there was at least a very distinct possibility that I was only going to have one life, (I thought) 'What can I do where I can touch a bunch of lives?' ... live a bunch of different lives," he said.

Those lives formed a chorus, calling him westward; Pope did a bit of TV work during his California years, but largely performed, wrote and directed for the stage. He joined the writers' room for a season of "Class of 3000," a Cartoon Network show, and completed some illustration work when chances arose, though it wasn't something Pope actively sought.

Perhaps the strangest, strongest draw was standup comedy. The form lives along a long, unforgiving learning curve, Pope said, and all its verbiage — succeed or fail — sounds violent: "crushed," "killed," "bombed." But the craft sits close to Pope's heart; it's the one art form among his many occupations where he senses "unfinished business."

Making his eventual Midwest return, Pope pursued an ideal somewhere between Buddhism and punk rock, he said — giving up on aspiration, committing to achieving nothing. Turns out, such purposeful inertia takes strong dedication and Pope channeled his energy into a new comic strip instead.

In the earliest, most isolating pandemic days, Pope purchased paints and an easel with modest intention. The supplies stood ready and untouched, spurring guilt, for nearly a year. Finally wrapping himself in these materials, Pope experienced a rupture in the atmosphere around him, something "like a bolt of lightning," he said.

Set on exploring, not achieving, and on letting impulse take over, Pope finished 21 paintings his first week. This, he sensed, was the work he was preparing to do all his life.

'I paint like a theater artist'

All instinct, the earliest stages of Pope's relationship to color felt primitive yet satisfying. With no real training in color mixing, he applied pure and primary colors to canvas in a way that proved garish, he said.

Learning to create thin glazes, he brought colors closer to each other, creating depth and nuance.

Pope continues to refine an emotional language through color — though not a taxonomy. Colors don't necessarily correspond to given feelings or sentiments but guide his mood as he paints.

"The color can create a purely emotional reaction," Pope said.

Believing we owe creativity, and so much of our living motion, to desire and intuition, not rationality, Pope chases his instincts as passionately — and quickly — as possible. When instinct truly takes over, he might be painting a corner of a canvas with one hand, and using a hair dryer to seal a section with the other.

Pushing past overthinking, Pope faces one true choice: let the impulse lead or interfere.

"What’s best is when I get out of the way," he said. "It feels like there’s a Martin-shaped door between the canvas and a much bigger world behind me that wants to come through."

Time matters, particularly the hour at which Pope engages his creative fates. Most days, he begins before dawn, before the day tries to take its pound of flesh.

"The world is yours ... and you can feel it and you can’t feel the clock ticking," he said of painting around 5 a.m. "You will soon — very soon."

These first few years' worth of paintings, ultimately, are made of moments. And this is how Pope knows the work reaches back through the acts of his life. He paints like a theater artist, he said.

"Even though it’s different work than I did before ... the fundamental principles seem to be transferable," Pope added.

Life on stage isn't necessarily about being clever, Pope said, but allowing the next moment to come and be fulfilled; this requires real, refined vulnerability and "radical honesty," he said. Painting, for him, is the ultimate realization of these ideals. Pope's images prove most satisfying when he is least guarded, he said.

And like a deep blue or purple, these ever-evolving qualities bleed into the rest of life. Today, Pope practices contentment with the outcomes of his art, and feels healthier and more himself among other people.

Engaging with viewers, Pope sometimes hears their surprise — that he has made this much work, this well, in such a short span. But all his life is on these canvases, a mark or gesture at a time.

Pope's Orr Street exhibit remains up through Sunday, Jan. 28. Keep up with his work at https://www.martinpopeart.com/ and via Facebook and Instagram.

Aarik Danielsen is the features and culture editor for the Tribune. Contact him at adanielsen@columbiatribune.com or by calling 573-815-1731. He's on Twitter/X @aarikdanielsen.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Daily Tribune: Martin Pope's fresh pursuit of painting springs from lifelong process