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Lot Essay
Martin creates wonderfully subtle abstractions that are poetic despite their mechanical nature. The grid is her trademark, and she uses it in ways antithetical to her strictly Minimalist contemporaries. In Untitled # 6, the changing values of the pencil lines creates a shimmering effect. The overall experience is one of contemplation, as the work demands long meditative viewing regardless of its seemingly simple structure. This contemplative experience is at odds with the major tenets of American Minimalism.
What was once considered cold, intellectual and purely formal becomes expressive and serene in Martin's hands. Martin's triumph is her ability to elicit emotion from rational order. She mines the visual image, reducing it until it conveys the most basic archetypal forms and thus evokes the most fundamental emotional responses.
A gessoed canvas upon which Martin has drawn with India ink and pencil, Untitled # 6 fuses both her drawing and her painting techniques. As with her paper works of the time, Martin creates a tension between the thin rectangles of her grid and the regular square of the canvas support.Within this formal friction, augmented in Untitled # 6 by the varying thickness of the lines, lies the means of Martin's art. The product is an allover effect of undulating rhythm, of musical vibrato, that plays against the regularity of her composition.
To experience Untitled # 6 is to enter a world that transcends its own simplicity, to experience beauty in its purist form. As Martin most poetically explains:
"When people go to the ocean they like to see it all day. There's nobody living who couldn't stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall. It's a simple experience, you become lighter and lighter in weight, you wouldn't want anything else. Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting. Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this. Not a specific response but that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature--an experience of simple joy, the simple, direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean."
(fig. 1) The artist photographed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, c 2000.
What was once considered cold, intellectual and purely formal becomes expressive and serene in Martin's hands. Martin's triumph is her ability to elicit emotion from rational order. She mines the visual image, reducing it until it conveys the most basic archetypal forms and thus evokes the most fundamental emotional responses.
A gessoed canvas upon which Martin has drawn with India ink and pencil, Untitled # 6 fuses both her drawing and her painting techniques. As with her paper works of the time, Martin creates a tension between the thin rectangles of her grid and the regular square of the canvas support.Within this formal friction, augmented in Untitled # 6 by the varying thickness of the lines, lies the means of Martin's art. The product is an allover effect of undulating rhythm, of musical vibrato, that plays against the regularity of her composition.
To experience Untitled # 6 is to enter a world that transcends its own simplicity, to experience beauty in its purist form. As Martin most poetically explains:
"When people go to the ocean they like to see it all day. There's nobody living who couldn't stand all afternoon in front of a waterfall. It's a simple experience, you become lighter and lighter in weight, you wouldn't want anything else. Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my painting. Nature is like parting a curtain, you go into it. I want to draw a certain response like this. Not a specific response but that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature--an experience of simple joy, the simple, direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean."
(fig. 1) The artist photographed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, c 2000.