Martin Ritchie Sharp (21 January 1942 – 1 December 2013) was an Australian artist, cartoonist, songwriter and film-maker.

Career

Sharp was born in Bellevue Hill, New South Wales in 1942, and educated at Cranbrook private school, where one of his teachers was the artist Justin O'Brien. In 1960, Sharp enrolled at the National Art School at East Sydney. He was one of the editors of '' Oz'', an Australia/UK alternative/ underground satire magazine published from 1963 to 1973 and associated with the international counterculture of that era. Sharp was called Australia's foremost pop artist. He wrote the lyrics of the

Cream Cream is a dairy product composed of the higher-fat layer skimmed from the top of milk before homogenization. In un-homogenized milk, the fat, which is less dense, eventually rises to the top. In the industrial production of cream, this proces ...

songs " Tales of Brave Ulysses and " Anyone for Tennis"," and created the cover art for Cream's '' Disraeli Gears'' and '' Wheels of Fire''

album An album is a collection of audio recordings (e.g., music) issued on a medium such as compact disc (CD), Phonograph record, vinyl (record), audio tape (like 8-track cartridge, 8-track or Cassette tape, cassette), or digital distribution, dig ...

s. He designed at least two

poster A poster is a large sheet that is placed either on a public space to promote something or on a wall as decoration. Typically, posters include both typography, textual and graphic elements, although a poster may be either wholly graphical or w ...

s for Australia's premier contemporary

circus A circus is a company of performers who put on diverse entertainment shows that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, dancers, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, magicians, ventriloquists, and unicy ...

, Circus Oz, including the 'World-famous'/'Non-Stop Energy' design.

Later interests

For most of the 1970s and beyond, Sharp's work and life was dominated by two major interests: Sydney's Luna Park and the entertainer Tiny Tim.

Luna Park

Sharp's involvement as an artist, in the restoration of

Luna Park Sydney Luna Park Sydney is a Heritage register, heritage-listed amusement park located at 1 Olympic Drive, Milsons Point, New South Wales, Australia, on the northern shore of Port Jackson, Sydney Harbour. The amusement park is owned by the Luna Park ...

in the early 1970s, proved a bittersweet experience. In 1979, as pressure mounted to redevelop the prime harbourside site, a fire in the Luna Park Ghost Train claimed seven lives, including a father and his two sons and four 13-year-old schoolmates. The fire was a turning point in Sharp's life; like many others he firmly believed that it was a deliberate act of terrorism aimed at destroying the park and making the site available for redevelopment. He later stated this had a profound effect on his spiritual outlook. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Sharp played an important role in saving Luna Park from development as the head of the Friends of Luna Park activist group.

Tiny Tim

Sharp first saw performer Tiny Tim at the

Royal Albert Hall The Royal Albert Hall is a concert hall on the northern edge of South Kensington, London, England. It has a seating capacity of 5,272. Since the hall's opening by Queen Victoria in 1871, the world's leading artists from many performance genres ...

in 1968 at the suggestion of

Eric Clapton Eric Patrick Clapton (born 1945) is an English Rock music, rock and blues guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He is regarded as one of the most successful and influential guitarists in rock music. Clapton ranked second in ''Rolling Stone''s l ...

. From that time on, Tiny Tim was one of Sharp's strongest inspirations.

"Tim's appropriation of song is very much like my appropriation of images. We are both collagists taking the elements of different epochs and mixing them to discover new relationships."

"Eternity"

Sharp's work was celebrated in many exhibitions including a special'' Yellow House'' exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW and a major retrospective at the Museum of Sydney which ran from October 2009 to March 2010.

Sydney Opera House

Sharp maintained a lifelong friendship with artist Lin Utzon, daughter of the Danish architect of the Sydney Opera House Jørn Utzon. The architect was controversially forced from his uncompleted masterpiece in 1966 and secretly left Australia with the aid of Sharp's mother. In the mid-1990s, Sharp helped broker a reconciliation between the Sydney Opera House and Jørn Utzon, who subsequently developed a set of design principles to guide the building's future.

''Street of Dreams''

Sharp merged several of his key obsessions - Tiny Tim, Luna Park, Sydney and the 1979 Luna Park Ghost Train fire - into a planned feature documentary entitled '' Street of Dreams'' that explored all of these themes and the perceived connections between them. The film was never finished, though a rough cut screened at festivals circulates online.

Death

Sharp inherited the heritage-listed house ''Wirian'', in Victoria Road, Bellevue Hill, Sydney, in 1978. The house had been bought by Sharp's grandfather, Stuart Douglas Ritchie, a merchant, in 1937 for 20,000 pounds. Sharp lived there until he died from

emphysema Emphysema is any air-filled enlargement in the body's tissues. Most commonly emphysema refers to the permanent enlargement of air spaces (alveoli) in the lungs, and is also known as pulmonary emphysema. Emphysema is a lower respiratory tract di ...

on 1 December 2013, at the age of 71.