DEBORAH MARTIN
Florida transplant, Deborah Martin fell so in love with her new home’s flora and fauna that when she started to make art again, they became her inspiration. The “fragility of nature,” Martin states is her constant theme. This focus may have been reignighted by the Gulf Oil Spill of 2010, during which time Martin threw herself into making work that depicted the beauty of the coral reefs, turtles and fish that were and are still in danger. Desiring to bring awareness to their plight.
Martin loves nature and loves to draw - this combination produces work that is an accurate and close-up depiction of creatures in their environment. She uses encaustics, the once archaic medium that gives her work a softness, juxtaposed with the crisp clear line of her drawings.
As Martin says about her process,
“My medium of choice is encaustics,… which gives me the flexibility of discovery. My encaustic surfaces are labored and develop over time. I try to preserve what’s underneath while creating something new with each layer. By scraping wax away, my process turns into an excavation, discovering colors, textures and images. Also incorporated into the encaustic paintings are my drawings, paintings, poetry and original transfer prints.”
In this exhibit we see our creatures – turtles and birds. Martin has also created a series on elephants and their young. Martin creates intricate drawings of intimate moments in the life of her subjects. She shows us the beauty of the nature we might lose in the hope that we to will fall in love and care. Martin – an Artist Activist.
Martin graduated from Skidmore College and received an MFA from the State University of New York at Albany. She taught art at Skidmore in early 1990s and then for 10 years at Green Mountain College in Vermont. Subsequently, Martin opened Gallery 100 in Saratoga Springs, which she successfully ran for eight years until she moved to Naples, Florida in 2011. Since that time, she has dedicated herself to making art and works everyday in her studio. Martin has shown her work regionally in both New York and SW Florida and has won several awards in juried exhibitions.
