The marvelous is not the same in every period of history—it partakes in some obscure way of a sort of general revelation only the fragments of which come down to us: they are the romantic ruins, the modern mannequins, or any other symbol capable of affecting the human sensibility for a period of time,

then the first of Lake’s many accomplishments was to break the post office down into its fragments and re-create it from “romantic ruins” into the dream-edifice that, for thirty years, has horrified and delighted visitors to the post office.

The astute observer will note that the post office walls in Lake’s painting are created with careful crosshatching brushstrokes layered over a dampened whiteness. This whiteness, upon close examination, is composed of hundreds of bones—skulls, femurs, ribs—all compressed and rendered with a pathetic delicacy that astounds the eye.

On a surface level, this imagery surely functions as a symbolic nod to the building’s former usage. Conceived to house the Cappan and his family, the brooding structure that would become the Voss Bender Memorial Post Office was abandoned following the dissolution of the Cappandom and then converted into a repository for the corpses of mushroom dwellers and indigent children. After a time, it fell into disuse—as Lake effectively shows with his surfaces beneath surfaces: the white columns slowly turning gray-green, the snarling gargoyles blackened from disrepair, the building’s entire skin pocked by lichen and mold.

Lake frequently visited the post office and must have been familiar with its former function. When the old post office burned down and relocated to its present location in what was little better than an abandoned morgue, it is rumored that the first patrons of the new service eagerly opened their post boxes only to find within them old and strangely delicate bones—the bones Lake has “woven” into the “fabric” of his painting.

Lake’s interpretation of the building is superior in its ability to convey the post office’s psychic or spiritual self. As the noted painter and instructor Leonard Venturi has written:

Take two pictures representing the same subject; one may be dismissed as illustration if it is dominated by the subject and has no other justification but the subject, the other may be called painting if the subject is completely absorbed in the style, which is its own justification, whatever the subject, and has an intrinsic value.

Lake’s representation of the post office is clearly a painting in Venturi’s sense, for the subject is riddled through with wormholes of style, with layers of meaning.—From Janice Shriek’s A Short Overview of the Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for The Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.