Martin Sharp: Sydney Artist

If Sydney has a colour, it's the sparkle in Martin Sharp's eyes. Streeton may have captured the city's flowering from bush settlement to city sprawl; Dupain, the cut, thrust and shadow of her civilian tides, and Whiteley, the opiatic ecstasy of her harbour. But only Martin Sharp has ensnared Sydney's essence: that comic-strip convict town forever caught between the Devil and the deep blue sea.

Today, the man still revered as one of the world's foremost pop artists lives as a virtual recluse in the shambling Sharp family mansion at Bellevue Hill. There, among the relics of his psychedelic past, he fastidiously toils, conjuring new masterpieces with Sydney souls.

Sharp's odyssey began in Sydney's eastern suburbs where, as an only child, he grew up "in a world of cartoons", obsessively painting, storytelling and cutting up his mother's magazines for collages. Sharp's art bloomed at Cranbrook and the National Art School in East Sydney. In 1963 he met two student magazine editors, Richard Neville and Richard Walsh, united in a quest to publish a "magazine of dissent" and signed on as art director of Oz.

Sharp's skewering of narrow-minded Australia unleashed chaos. The Oz team was twice charged with obscenity. Tried and convicted, Sharp was gaol-bound until public outcry earned acquittal. The furore, combined with a sold-out debut solo exhibition Art for Mart's Sake, made Martin Sharp a star.

Burned and spurned, the Oz trio fled Sydney, trekked through Asia, split up in Kathmandu, then reformed in London. A new Oz was born, quickly becoming a bible of the underground for a new wave of artists, musicians and publishers (among them Time Out founder Tony Elliott). Sharp's cover art satire (the Queen on rollerskates!) became the new toast of London.

Around this time Sharp wandered into a famous nightclub, the Speakeasy, and got chatting with a couple of musicians. He told them of a siren-song poem he'd written after a trip to Ibiza and they urged him to write it on a napkin. Eric Clapton dropped over to Sharp's flat on the Kings Road a couple of months later, having converted that serviette scrawl into ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses', the B-side of Cream's classic anthem ‘Strange Brew'.

Sharp's subsequent album covers for Cream, vivid concert posters for Dylan, Hendrix and Donovan plus his irreverent canon of Oz covers and unique protest artworks, came to symbolise the swinging 60s and made him a hero in the art world.

Global fame was his, but Sharp heard a siren calling: Sydney. Artist friend George Gittoes recalls: "With its lifeless streets and 10pm closing, Sydney was dead - Martin brought the chance of life back to it."

Sharp founded the Yellow House, a derelict mega-terrace in Potts Point that he converted into a 24/7 performance space with walls as living art. It became the bohemian eye of Sydney, a gallery slum for the city's creatives. "It was like the Beatles' Yellow Submarine had docked inside and unloaded its psychedelic cargo onto the walls," says Gittoes. Sharp was its heart: "Supernaturally charismatic, with glittering lapis lazuli-blue eyes and an energy and aura that made a war on entrenched stupidity seem winnable - he was a star, and with his aristocratic Sydney wealth, the living embodiment of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince."

Sharp became Sydney's eyes ever after. And, for much of the 70s, the brain behind its most famous face, working to revamp Luna Park "just for fun" until the Devil devoured seven souls in the Ghost Train fire of '79 and scorched the artist's synapses forever. It sent Sharp on a new Sydney quest: to etch Arthur Stace's 'Eternity' back on the city's heart, a feat he beamed to billions on New Years Eve, 1999.

Sharp's quests today are complex (civil liberties, aboriginal rights) and comic (Tiny Tim, Ginger Meggs), but as he told Time Out: "Art has been my way of having a say." Long may Sydney speak through him. Angus Fontaine