The Art of Fred Martin
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Paintings, June 2006



#6, June 2006


All paintings are acrylic on paper, 44 x 30 inches.

Scroll down for the paintings, click the images for larger views.



 


#1, June 2006


 


#2, June 2006

 


#3, June, 2006 (first state)


 


#3, June 2006 (second state)

 


#4, June 2006


 


#5,
June 2006
 

 


#6, June 2006
Private Collection, Sacramento CA


 


#7, June 2006


 


#8, June 2006.


 


 

A Fragment from June studio notes...

June 22, 2006
Oakland, late night.

Noticing the Metropolitan Museum Samuel Palmer catalog on the living room table…

Storm the heights of Heaven,
Dance on the parapets of Eternity,
Fly the shining skies of Infinity…

 

That’s what I wanted to do in my youth, whether I have done it or not…

For Palmer, there was all that to do, but he lived only a small bourgeois life.

When in my youth I first saw Palmer’s work, it was then the work of his youth was all there was for me to see. That work and Kandinsky’s and others’ showed me one could indeed “storm the heights of heaven.” Now, with the Met show and catalog, I see Palmer failed.

Failed what? My ideal. That ideal could not exist long in his time and place. Victorian England had other heights to scale, other times to conquer and other spaces to travel. And the most sure proof of that is in his loving son’s action to save his father’s reputation by burning all of the youthful works that remained in his father’s studio after his death. The half dozen works that inspired me turn out to be all that remains of Palmer’s youth, and they remain only because they had passed some earlier time into the possession of someone else.

Maybe it is that storming the heights of heaven can never be more than a youthful dream… Yet, it was and is the dream that drives.

 


Directory to all Fred Martin's Art.