Biography

Fascinated by the beauty of the world and dedicated to producing work that speaks of its mysteries, Don Martin spent his life using an eloquent visual language in an attempt to convey the complexities of human experience. His work occupies a unique place at the crossroads between Beat assemblage and the psychedelic visionary art that followed. Using exotic cast-off materials, he transforms everyday items into elegant object-poetry and asks us to look beyond the surface and consider the layered histories and enigmatic meanings of the objects themselves.

Born in Akron, Ohio, in 1931, Martin was primarily self-taught in art, although he studied briefly with Leroy Flint at the Akron Art Museum in 1948 and with abstract painters Carl Holty and Sydney Laufman at the Art Students League, New York, in 1949. In the early 1950s he embarked on an extended sojourn to Ajijic, Mexico, where he developed a strong interest in pre-Columbian art and culture. It was here that he first began to experiment with found objects and lacquer in his art. After meeting his future wife, Martin returned to the United States in 1960 and settled in Venice, California, with his family. During the six years that he spent in the Los Angeles area, Martin developed friendships with many of the artists and poets associated with the Beat movement, among them Wallace Berman, George Herms, Saul White, and Stuart Perkoff. Like his counterparts, Martin had little interest in the consumerist culture of the postwar era and sought an alternative method of personal expression. He saw the potential value of every object and experience, and believed that if approached with insight and patience, the world would only reveal beauty. Although he steadfastly denied categorization as a Beat artist, the ideology of that 1950s underground movement, with its emphasis on spiritual content and use of aged, cast-off materials, laid the foundation for much of his work. Martin also took inspiration from the tenets of visionary art, which followed closely on the heels on the Beats. Like visionary artists Robert Comings and Norman Stiegelmeyer, who considered their work to be “an instrument of spiritual communication and renewal,”1 art making for Martin was both a meditative and spiritual experience.

Upon moving to the quiet seclusion of the Santa Cruz Mountains in 1966, Martin began to more fully pursue his lacquer paintings, which are indicative of his commitment to spiritual pursuits. His subjects, such as the mandala, the river, and the door, often have otherworldly nuance and emphasize personal reflection, passage, and time.

Inspired by the artifacts he encountered while living in Mexico, Martin’s paintings often engage a wide array of ancient and pre-Columbian mythologies and symbols. In One (1979) the artists speaks to the influence of ancient cultures through his selection of colors. Red, yellow, black, and white hold both corporeal and spiritual meaning for many native peoples.2 The painting also reveals a fascination with the interplay of texture and color, as sinuous shapes and jewel-like forms twist together to create a flickering and pulsating pattern.3 Like Martin’s other paintings from this period, the pattern and texture of One result from a relief technique he pioneered in which he carefully covered a delicate piece of lace with twenty to thirty layers of lacquer. He then used a razor blade to methodically scrape away layers of paint to reveal striking, symmetrical tiers of pattern and color. The repetition of the underlying lace design creates a powerful and mesmerizing effect. In One the image seems to explode outwardly from the center. Teeming with brilliant colors and a richly polished surface, the work seems to visibly radiate energy. —L.W.

1. Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 176.
2. Rachel McKay, “A Child’s Eye,” exhibition wall text from Don Martin: Chasing That Kite (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Museum of Art and History, 1998).
3. This fascination with texture and color is indicative of the artist’s vocation as jewelry maker and metal worker for Goldsmyth, a local artist’s cooperative in the 1970s.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Martin was born in Akron, Ohio in 1931. Although primarily self-taught, he studied at the Akron Museum of Art in Akron, Ohio in 1948 with Leroy Flint, and with abstract painters Carl Holty and Sydney Laufman at the Art Student’s League, New York in 1949. He lived in Mexico from 1951-1960, and exhibited his work in Guadalajara, Ajijic, and Tepic. Martin returned to California in 1960 and moved to Los Angeles, where he resided until 1966. He then moved to Santa Cruz, where he lived from 1966-1989. He died in Tarzana, California in 1989. In 1998 the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, held a retrospective exhibition entitled Don Martin: Chasing That Kite. Currently, his work is in private collections in Mexico, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz. These will be the first works by Martin to enter SJMA’s permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2002)

---

Your current search criteria is: Artist is "Don Martin".