He made false teeth for twenty years. That is what paid for the paint. Alan Martin had started painting seriously at eleven, and he went to Max Meldrum, and stayed with him for more than six years, which is a long apprenticeship for a man with a day job. He painted Meldrum too, or a mask of him, and it turned up at auction twenty years after he died.

Meldrum taught that you do not draw a thing. You find its tone, you match it, you set it against the tone beside it, and if the relationships are right the picture arrives without ever being described. Look at the hill here. There is not a line in it anywhere. The heather is one flat purple mass, the pasture a flat green one, the range behind a single blue note laid down once and left alone. The house is four strokes and a chimney. That is the method, and it is how we know the hand.

In 1959 the Archibald hung sixty four portraits, and two of the painters in it had come out of the same Melbourne school. Martin was there with John McClelland. Shirley Bourne had two in the same show, of the painter Roland Wakelin and of Peter Monahan, and the following year the Wakelin went into the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Bourne had come down from Brisbane, worked as an assistant in William Dargie's studio, won the Dora Wilson Travelling Scholarship and spent three years painting in England and Europe. Martin had been making teeth in Melbourne. Some years after that show he painted her, a hundred centimetres by seventy four.

He had been a finalist once before, in 1956, with a portrait of Alan Marshall, who wrote I Can Jump Puddles and who lived in Eltham. He was not a finalist again. From about 1965 he taught instead, and by 1980 more than a hundred and twenty people had been through his classes at Eltham and at Kew. He died in 1989. Four of his pictures are in the Nillumbik Shire collection, and the Ian Potter Museum holds work by him and by Bourne both.

This one never left the family. It is unsigned, painted on canvas laid down onto board, and on the back somebody has written By. ALAN MARTIN. in heavy black marker, and after it, in a finer hand, (Lesly D. Martin). In 1985 the Shire of Eltham put on an exhibition at the Eltham Community Centre called Paintings from the Martin Collection, lent by Alan and Lesly Martin. Above that label is a second one, torn from the same perforated sheet, and nothing survives of it but the gum. We say attributed because it is not signed and because the writing on the back is not his. We do not say it because we are unsure whose hand this is.

Which leaves the only thing nobody can tell you, which is where it is. Purple hills, green paddocks, a white house with its roof going blue in the late light. Martin painted the outback and he painted Suffolk. You could come over a rise in Victoria and see this. You could come over one in England and see it too. He knew which. We do not.