Fred Martin Paintings

About my work, 1950-59
College Avenue, Maxwell and Harrison Street: What it All Meant
Click the image to go to the set of images.

1950-52, College Avenue. It was the first of "pounding together my pastiche," of "finding my eclectic," of "launching my appropriations," or more vernacularly but appropriately put, of "getting my shit together." The war of formalism and Romanticism, of Mysticism and Literature, of aesthetic beauty and the raw animalism of sex, boiling together at last without an academic mould... but with love and marriage and beginning a family and finding a job as the driving forces... It was the first chapter of growing up.	1953-54, Maxwell and Stinson Beach and College Avenue And the second chapter of growing up, having a job teaching elementary and high school in a very small country town where we knew nobody, and nobody had our interests. And trying to discover mine. When I was a student, I had been a radical young turk (scared shitless, as they say). Now, in Maxwell California, where nobody shares the concerns that had made the world all the four years before, what are one's own concerns, what is one's own world? And, finally, is there a "one's own" world? At the end of it, I began to give up the then cutting edge (a term that did not then exist) in order to be true to myself (as David Park had suggested a few years before, "Why bother with anyone else?)--and that self was the transformation of my life force from raw sex to the force of sex for the building of a world where men and women and children and the generations can live in love.
1955-57, Harrison Street and the Landscape of Travel. I was no longer a provincial member of the avant garde, I was no longer a school teacher, I was a young man trying to support a family and to find my way as a human being by making images of my inner life. That that inner life was a longing for elsewhere and other times... only Venice for the senses (which drove me each day with desperate passion) and Rome for eternity (which somehow would give surcease from the drive of nature and time in my loins)--only very old dreams of old cities could satisfy. I painted them, and painted them again hundreds of times. The point was not to accumulate objects (commodities as later critics might call these things), but to experience in the act of imaging the feelings of the place of the image. Process, not product. And my seeds of commercial failure were surely sown.	1955-57, Harrison Street and the Landscape of the Imagination. One day in our gigantic moldering old house on Harrison I went high up into the open cupola and painted pictures of the clouds passing. Knowing it or not, in art we project our dreams (OK, call it the unconscious... sounds more scientific). And what are our dreams but the images which may show the way to peace? And the peace I sought was the peace of my sexuality, not some sailor sailed away forever on the sea of lust--a girl in every port, or, better, every street corner--but my sexuality secured and grounded in wife and marriage and children and home. Odd that the mosque with its dome and minaret should come to be that, but so it was... in a square garden with a fruit tree and fountain by the sea.
1957-58, Harrison Street. Drawings of the Dying City. Our rotting old house--no matter how much I painted and wallpapered it in my image of old Venice--ate into my soul as the image of the truths of my life. In those years of the late 1950's, the Western Addition neighborhood of San Francisco, a district of once grand now ruinous mansions like the ours in Oakland, became the outer surrogate for the inner sense of rot and guilt in my soul. My wife had a Saturday job in San Francisco, and each Saturday after I drove her to work, I walked the streets of the city, drawing not what I saw with my eyes but the energies and images of the city I sensed in my soul. And in the night of those days, I drew the city of my dreams.	1957-58, Harrison Street. Paintings of the Dying City I drew as I walked in the streets of the city, and other times I brought my paintbox and paint. I sat in the driver's seat of my car, used the steering wheel for an easel and painted what I saw of the despair of old houses rotting. Other times, I opened the trunk, set my panel on whatever in there could hold it up, and painted standing in the gutter. And yet other times, I sat on the curb. My goal was to show the places... after all, they were me.
1957-58, Harrison Street. Painting on the Art Bulletin. I was covering the cracks in our old house with some stuff called "texture," a plastery powder you mix with water and color to make what you will. I had seen medieval manuscripts and knew the power and reality a piece of paper might have, and I was finding that the single image of a landscape could not carry all the sounds and sights, feelings and spaces in my head that a manuscript might. And with the reality of texture like flaking plaster, and with pre-existing images of lust and salvation from the pages of the Art Bulletin, I began to move from oil to watercolor and from the picture plane as landscape to the picture plane as plane of mind. And I found the forest of Hesperus is the forest of immortality where the fountain of life is.	1957-58, Harrison Street. Painting on the pages of old books. I used up what the Art Bulletin could give me, but I needed old paper to say the old things rolling in my head. I searched used book stores for old books with old paper and found an old German religious book. It was ideal for my purposes--I could not read a word, the paper was old rag paper with the feel of reality to it and foxing which already told of old signs, sigils and talismans (one of my phrases for the lost marks of salvation which I sought). I marked the pages with the signs of the autumn of that year, and marked this page with a message to myself... As in "Again, again, I go only to seed in immortality..." The life of the rose, the stems and thorns, the buds, blossoms and falling petals--and then the rose-hips loaded with seed--these were my vision of life from youth to age, from the young husband I was to the old man I have now become... ejaculation is the seed of the future, sperm is the seed of immortality in the eternity of time.
1958, Harrison Street. "Do you know my name?" Jung writes of "active imagination," a way of following an image as it develops... even through a lifetime. And I had read what he wrote. Jung writes of the mandala as a possible symbol/shape for the potential wholeness of the psyche (soul?), and I had seen some Hindu/Buddhist examples as well as those in his book Symbols of Transformation. Joland Jacobi gives a diagram of Jung's concept of the conscious/unconscious mind in her book The Psychology of Jung; and I had a copy of that book. And I had found a white bird descending in a valley as the symbol of my masculinity, and a heart as the symbol of the love which that bird promises forever to keep. And there was the diamond of the four directions with light and dark, and the blue of the waters of life, and two snakes I had seen twining in a painting by Morris Graves. And in 1958 one day with the question, "Do you know my name?" I followed all of that to seek an answer.	1958-59, Harrison Street. The streams of 9 x 12 images. Nowadays "Do you know my name?" lives in a manila folder with perhaps a hundred or more other folders, each filled with similar "active imaginations" of the images of the life of the soul. For several years--late 1957-early 58 through 1961 or 62--night after night I would follow the paths of the images as they appeared in the mysterious intercourse of paper and paint, a bit of newspaper, a fragment of a painting or a scrap from an old travel book. Then was laid down the way of working I have followed mostly since (click for the year 2000 affirmation of that), and the images in that work more than forty years ago have so many returned so often in my own spiral of a human life.

1959, Harrison Street.
"In the quiet of the night hours..."

It happened that there was a group show, initially started by Sam Francis in conjunction with Grace Morely, then Director of the San Francisco Museum of Art (always referred to then as "the Museum," now the SFMOMA), and in a sense finally curated by me because the Museum would not show Sam alone and so he proposed I show with him and then asked me who else to show and I suggested Wally Hedrick and Manuel Neri.

We were each asked to write a statement. I had a hard time, and first came up with this...

Then, finally, with a manuscript... this

“In the quiet of the night hours and. in the stillness of certain Sundays it has been my pleasure and my fancy to play with the older marks of time and eternity, of being and becoming and space and death. (And all of this because of my hunger for birth and for hope and for continuation.) Thus, as one may make a game of solitaire from cards of only half-remembered origin, I have begun to make a quiet game again of signs of the beginning, of sigils, talismans, and marks of the ever—and the never—day. I am guided always in this play by the resonance of its colors, the twining of its shapes, and also by the continual echo of abandoned words and phrases from times now more quiet and vanished. These games, then, in their slow procession, guided by memory and wish and by their inner being, are the music of my nights and the cause why I do not dream. For the function of dream is in them; they have set the boundary and are the sun upon its verge.

“But now is not the time to speak of dream, but rather to enumerate and praise, now, the great rood of time and the old rose upon it, the sweet and blessed cross turning always at the root, and the far, the immeasurably far, there where the reaping is, and the promise which all things make, and especially these, (for I am a Romantic and have never been able to forget the promise nor to abandon it) that there should be on it the stain of everness: a hope that will remain ineradicably in the deeps of passing and despair for loss. It was, then, that old rose upon the rood of time, the blossom of true blood and of life and death upon the cross of the world.

“Thus have I gone to dwell on the edges of the world, where the eternal streaming is. For so do I make for thee an endlessness of life and a safety in the stream of time.

That year also, there was another show,
at The Cellar, a "jazz and poetry" bar.
It was the beatnik era, there were such places
and this was the poster.

1959, Have You Golden Wings?

Click here for a text about this work.