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About Martin Beck
I am a writer and artist who explores the body as a site of memory, desire, injury, endurance, and change. Although I have only been writing fiction for a few years, I have been drawing and painting the figure for many years. I have studied in New York and Pittsburgh and have shown my work nationally and internationally. The body is the first language that I have ever known. It is exposed, and it is defended; it is sensual, and it is ashamed; it is strong, and it is weak. The body can carry things that the conscious mind is not yet ready to know.
My current project, A Theory of Body, is a novel set in the late-1980s New York art world. It follows the story of a young woman who is lured into the orbit of artistic charisma, erotic dependency, ambition, and control. The novel, as with my visual work, is concerned with the body that is exposed, that is defended, that is sensual, and that is ashamed. It explores the unstable self and the desperate need to be seen by another and how one can be remade by another’s vision.
In my thirties, I was diagnosed with Ankylosing Spondylitis, an autoimmune disease that affects the entire body. It changed my relationship to physical activity, to time, to my work and to my body. It didn’t teach me any lessons; it didn’t even provide any redemption. It was more like pressure, interruption, descent, and finally a different way of being.
My experience as a psychotherapist and my experience with trauma, secrecy, power, symbolic life, and the ways in which people find to survive are also part of my work. However, my writing and my art are not therapy. They are darker, more complex, more unruly than that. They are witnessing. They are trying to find out what remains hidden, what keeps returning, what the body holds that language cannot.
Artist Statement
The Mind: Depth Psychology and the Art of Witnessing
I’ve always thought that the parts of us that we haven’t worked out yet don’t disappear. They wait; they go underground; they can enter the body, our dreams, repeated mistakes, our strange attractions, and the images we just can’t let go of. The psyche rarely approaches us directly; it does so through metaphors, fragments, obsessions, silences, and avoidance. The self is complex, symbolic, contradictory, and largely unknown.
I am interested in the moment when the hidden, buried part of ourselves is revealed, not as an explanation but as presence. That has more voltage. That gets closer to the actual intellectual and artistic engine: the psyche as buried weather, the symbol as emissary, the wound as a place where meaning risesd.
The Body: Descent, Transformation, and Inner Fire
My artwork is based on the body: weathered, sensual, vulnerable and marked by time. I do not use the body as an object to be drawn, but as a site of memory, lineage and of meanings that are not yet verbalized. My fiction and my artwork are based on the body, which is never passive. It remembers, it resists, it desires, it suffers, it betrays, it reveals. The body holds the hidden life of a character before she even knows her.
Ankylosing Spondylitis has been a long and uneven conversation with pain. It began as an unwelcome visitor, and over time has become a slow-burning fire that has worn away at my ambitions and revealed something more obscure, more interior. I don’t believe that illness brings wisdom. I’m wary of that kind of suffering-romancing. But it has changed the focus of my attention, in some ways, and has helped me to wait, to listen, to notice the pressure beneath the surface, and to tap into some deeper, older well.
The wound no longer has to be overcome. It can be carried consciously, even symbolically, with reverence even. My writing returns to wounded figures, not because they are made more by their suffering, but because the wound changes how they perceive. The wound alters what they can see, what they can endure, what they can even imagine. I return again and again to characters whose bodies are wiser than they are, and whose suffering is not a means to an end, but a threshold – dangerous, intimate, and meaningful.
The Word: Fiction, Image, and the Dangerous Self
It took me a long time to start writing after I had fallen ill. After many years of producing images I started to write notes in the margins of my sketchbooks. Later I started to write scenes, then fragments, voices, and eventually whole lives. Writing is another way of drawing. Instead of painting the surface of the body, I am trying to paint its pressure, its hauntings and its architecture.
A Theory of Body is set in the late 1980s in New York City in the world of art. The story follows a young woman who is drawn to the power of the artist’s charisma and is subsequently sucked into a world of erotic dependency, of extreme ambition and of control. It explores the blurred line between creating oneself and erasing oneself and what happens when one’s drive to be seen is used by another to recreate them.
I am also writing other works of fiction, some of which delve more deeply into ancestral memory, historical trauma and the uncanny. In Her Blood the River Flows is a novel exploring inheritance, art, vision and family memory. Beauty & Terror Inhabits Breath is a cycle of interconnected stories based around the Novi Sad Razzia, the 1942 massacre on the frozen Danube. These works of fiction move through horror, witness and remembrance and contain traces of what history was unable to hold.
The body is archive and threshold in my fiction. It is the locus where desire is housed, where shame is recorded, where history enters the blood, where silence speaks in unexpected ways. My characters are often those whose bodies know more than they do and I am interested in exploring the ways in which beauty and danger are intertwined. I am not trying to explain anything with my writing. Instead I am trying to trace, to bear witness to, to follow something that insists on being returned to again and again.
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