Félix Aimé Martin (1899–1984) was born in Valence, south-eastern France. After completing primary schooling at the age of 13, he was hired as a delivery boy for a family-owned fabric company. He married Gabrielle Élisa Gaillard in 1926 but was widowed seven years later. He raised his two children with help from his mother and, later, his aunt. Martin was employed by the same fabric company for more than 50 years, performing various roles. He was awarded a gold medal for his work, which included hand-crafting wool rugs.

A shy and retiring type, Martin occupied his time by reading and collecting stamps. In the late 1950s, he discovered what he described as a new form of “amusement”: making sketches on pieces of cardboard, torn-out calendar pages and sheets of graph paper as he listened to the radio in the evenings. Over the course of two decades, he produced a vast body of work amounting to over 500 drawings in four-colour ballpoint pen (black, green, red and blue). Martin’s regular, symmetrical compositions – featuring curves, straight lines and other perfectly executed shapes – reflect the artist’s painstaking devotion to his craft.