Marty Baptist • Art for your head

Marty Baptist has been exhibiting since 2003. Australian contemporary artist, based up here in the Northern Rivers, and he'll paint just about anything that holds paint. Canvas, walls, shirts, skateboards. Strong colour, loose figures, and odd little scraps of text that read like something you half heard at the servo and then couldn't stop thinking about. He works with brands and creatives all over the world. The job, more or less, is pulling the strange out of an ordinary day.

Text, colour, and the strangeness of the everyday

 

Marty came up through skating and street art and it's all still in there. Big flat colour. Figures caught mid thought. And always the words.

He writes them how people actually talk, then leaves you to sort out whether he means it. That gap, between dead serious and taking the piss, is where the work lives. Nothing gets explained. There's no artist statement taped to the wall. You either catch it or you don't, and he's fine either way.

Where the work's landed

Krooked Skateboards. Cliché in France. Adidas, where he painted the obstacles for the Away Days Tour in Sydney. Paramount House. Warner Brothers. Jardan. Back in the early 2000s he did Hosier Lane in Melbourne alongside Invader and Lance Mountain.

Shows at Liverpool Street Gallery, Lismore Regional, Station Street, plus Tokyo and New York. His zine Shadows Of The Mess You Made sits in the National Library of Australia. He started Japan National in 2017 and opened its Gallery Division in Byron in 2020.

He gives a fair bit of it away too. Work's gone to the MOSS Foundation, Médecins Sans Frontières, Bondi Icebergs, and both flood and bushfire relief.

 

Art that gets used, not stored

 

"When a painting becomes a commodity locked in storage it's quite sad"

That explains most of how he works. He'd rather a piece was out in the world getting knocked about than sitting in a crate quietly going up in value. Canvas, deck, tee, wall. Same instinct, different surface.

Which is exactly why we get on.

 

Marty and Rallee, from Quiet Please onwards

Marty's been with us since the first range.

 

That Quiet Please wordmark, struck through, is his handwriting. It's the umpire's line, the one that drops a crowd to silence before a point.

 

Two words every player, and a lot of rowdy spectators, have had barked at them, redrawn into something you'd actually wear.

The tees sold out and haven't come back. The Quiet Please caps carry the same mark.

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One of one, hand painted

So we went back to him (just around the block, conveniently) and this time he painted hats.

A very limited run of bucket hats. Each one hand painted and hand finished in his studio, so no two are the same. Black, bleached back and sprayed, with the Rallee script in teal and a green underbrim holding the whole thing together. No repeats, no reprints, no second drop. Once they're gone, they're gone.

A percentage of every hat goes straight back to Marty. When the art's the product, that's how it should work.

Shop the Marty Baptist Bucket Hat