The Art of Fred Martin
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Scroll Down For Paintings numbered 8 through 15, June 2008
with studio notes about the paintings

 


#8, June 2008.
 

All are acrylic on paper, 15 x 11 inches



 

 
#8, June 2008.
 

June 11, 2008.
Lack Ouareau, morning.
#8, June 2008.
A very early morning note while exploring the effects of pen, watercolor pencil and acrylic..:

I, Gemini.
Why should I not show this thing source of all my glory and shame, pleasure and pain, building and ruin, beauty and ugliness, light and shadow, the endless turning source of all my drive of life?

It is sex that drives us out of childhood into time, from a timeless Paradise into the living and dying of the generations.

In 1956 and at the Oakland Museum and matting the Esther Fenner Fuller collection, I fell without noticing out of the Battle of the Titans. I had dozens of small rectangles cut from mat board to make the windows for Esther's prints and drawings and had nothing to paint on and painted on those little pieces of cardboard. After the 6 Gallery show with fifty or a hundred of those little things (we had lots of museum installation generated bits of plywood in addition to the mat board pieces), somehow for so many years and now again, those small things became my format and size.

 


#9, June 2008.

June 11, 2008.
Lack Ouareau, afternoon.
#9, June 2008.
"Odd blood, only blood"
[A revisit of the late 1950's
eucalyptus pods ("sun buds")]

 


#10, June 2008.

June 11, 2008.
Lack Ouareau, night.
#10, June 2008.

A revisit of The Urn Overturned.
Thinking about these images, especially the urn which was on my 1967 Royal Marks announcement that I no longer have a copy of. What did it say, what did it look like? (The urn was also a page in the 1965-66 Beulah Land Book.)

And then remembering the manuscript dealer who called to say he had bought Jim Elliot’s library and archive, that it had something of mine in it from Dilexi and how much did I think it was worth. (How should I know?) Now, maybe twenty years later, I wonder if he had a copy of the Royal Marks announcement, and who may have bought it, and for what reason. It will never be an “art historical object,” because I have not made nor will a mark in the history of styles that since Vasari is art history in the West. Any mark I make is only the mark of the times of a man’s life, and there’s certainly no art history in telling my story as every one has a life story which is theirs and not mine.


 


#11 June 2008.
June 12, 2008.
Lac Ouareau, night.
"The rest is only pretty, only message matters.

"Seeding and budding, sprout and trunk, branch and twig and then the flower then the fruit. Then the dark and rain and snow—we will triumph.

"Night falls, day follows."

 


#12, June 2008.
June 12, 2008.
Lac Ouareau, late night.
"So much to see, so much to know
So much to do, so far to go
Before the night"
(With evening star)

#13, June 2008.
"
Look at the sunset--
follow it and die.
But listen: the dawn is roaring at your back."

June 13, 2008.
Lac Ouareau, last night and this morning.

Remembering The Roman Tomb from the mid 1960’s when the collage period was dying away
 begin #13, June 2008 as “The Roman Tomb”

Keep the dawn coming, the signs and symbols,
the age old game of cards,
the signs and symbols of all and ever.

 


#14, June 2008.
June 13, 2008.
Lac Ouareau, morning.
"Seed to sprout
Bud to flower
Fruit to fall
and rot to seed to live again"

If it had a title, it would be
"The Tower of Life"


#15, June 2008.
June 13, 2008.
Lac Ouareau, morning.
#15, June 2008.
Remembering the 18 x 18 inch
“Little Gray Home in the West"
except that when I looked it up,
it turned out to be
""The Little House in the Greenwood Grove"

See about the 18 x 18 inch collages ►


 

◄The Little House in the Greenwood Grove, 1964

About the work of the years 1961-65
and the 18 x 18 in. collages

There was a goal to my work I did not know; there was an image there I did not see.

The goal was my growth from the sailor to the good husbandman, and the image I did not see was the picture of that process.  I did not know the goal no matter how ardently it was desired because I knew only what I was that I did not want to be; I did not know what it was I would become.  I knew I would die in the polymorphous ocean of a sailor’s lust burning in my blood; I did not know that the fields and orchards of the Sonoma of my childhood would be the aurum nostrum to tell me how to live.

Teleology is the study—the knowledge—of the growth of forms in time from their origin until their extinction.  I think now my paintings 1961-65 show the teleology of the forms of my life as I became a husband and father, a householder and a man. 

The alchemist looked into the alembic; I looked into a square of paper on the studio table.  Our methods differed but our goal was the same.  Out of the nigredo that is the true source of all my life never to be denied and forever praised as origin and food for every day, my goal like the alchemist’s (Continue ►)


 

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