In summer 2025, we invited Martyn Cross to the Roberts Institute of Art Residency in Scotland.
Martyn Cross
July–August 2025
Martyn Cross is a UK-based painter whose work reflects a timelessness, making them hard to place in linear narratives of history. Inspired by medieval imagery, various literary genres and printed books, his paintings blend landscapes and figures with uncanny, otherworldly elements.
Using muted and vivid colours and layered dry-brushed pigment, Cross creates weathered textures reminiscent of medieval manuscripts and frescoes. His works range from small, intimate pieces to larger compositions of human forms morphing into landscapes where recurring motifs such as clouds, waterfalls, suns and pointing fingers populate his dreamlike worlds.
Martyn spent six weeks in residence at Cortachy Castle and during that time immersed himself in local and wider Scottish histories and landscapes, as well as his own family history.
I'll take away so much from this experience. It's been such a privilege to be here. To be able to spend six weeks completely separated from everything that is my normal life, that’s such a rare thing to be able to do that.
— Martyn Cross
Drawn to cultures that have left only fragmentary traces, Martyn focused on Pictish culture — the Early Medieval peoples of what is now Scotland. He visited Pictish standing stones, including at the Aberlemno Sculptured Stones located close to the residency and was particularly inspired by their often-enigmatic carved symbols.
As part of this research, Martyn travelled to the Isle of Lewis to visit the Calanais Standing Stones — a cross-shaped arrangement erected some 5,000 years ago, predating Stonehenge.
Patrick Ashmore, who excavated at Calanais in the early 1980s writes: ‘The most attractive explanation […] is that every 18.6 years, the moon skims especially low over the southern hills. It seems to dance along them, like a great god visiting the earth. Knowledge and prediction of this heavenly event gave earthly authority to those who watched the skies.’ Various other finds of archaeological significance have been discovered on the site, including pottery and the grave of a man which included six fine arrowheads.
Alongside researching this early history, Martyn also pursued a more recent thread: the Scottish side of his own family. Seeking to learn more about his late grandfather, he visited Bo’ness, west of Edinburgh.
There he encountered an old cemetery whose grass-covered gravestones lie flat, prompting reflections on how, in millennia to come, such markers might be unearthed and decoded, much as Pictish stones are now.
In the residency studio, Martyn continued several paintings already in progress and began new works informed by these experiences, sustaining his enquiry into how fragments of the past surface in the present.
He also maintained a daily drawing practice as a visual diary. Among these are his ‘pocket drawings’ — credit-card-sized works that he carries with him, allowing them to absorb a life beyond the act of making.
Watch the residency film above to join Martyn in the studio and on his travels across Scotland.
