Matthew Martin was born in Broken Hill and grew up in Adelaide. He took up full-time cartooning in Sydney in 1981 at the Sydney Morning Herald. Between 1987 and 2004 he made 150 T-shirt designs for surf brand Mambo. Martin won the Stanley and Walkley Awards for his cartoons and a collection of his cartoons was published as 250 Cartoons by Anne O’Donovan in 1986 and as Happiness Is A Good Duck by Vintage in New York in 1989.
Martin moved to New York in 1990 where he freelanced as an illustrator for most major American newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, Time magazine, The Village Voice and Rolling Stone. Martin returned to live in Sydney in 2001. He drew cartoons for The Times (London) 2004 – 2007 and occasionally contributed cartoons to The New Yorker and to Australian newspapers.
In 2007 he was a finalist in the Dobell Prize For Drawing at the Art Gallery of NSW with his ink and brush drawings “100 Views of Wylie’s Baths”. He held his first solo show of drawings at Damien Minton Gallery in Redfern in May 2008.
Artist, cartoonist and Wylie's Baths regular Matthew Martin explains how swimming in Sydney's most beautiful tidal pool feeds his drawing addiction, in this short interview for the exhibition Sand in the City at the Museum of Sydney