About the Artist
Deborah Martin - Artist
Love and concern for our environment - our oceans and its inhabitants.
Florida transplant, Deborah Martin fell so in love with her new home's flora and fauna that they became her inspiration. The "fragility of nature," Martin states is her constant theme. This focus may have been reignited by the Gulf Oil spill of 2010, during which time Martin threw herself into making work that depicted the beauty of the coral reefs, turtles and fish that were and are still in danger. Desiring to bring awareness to their plight.
Martin loves nature and loves to draw - this combination produces work that is an accurate and close-up depiction of creatures in their environment. She uses encaustic wax, the once archaic medium that gives her work a softness and translucency, juxtaposed with the crisp clear line of her drawings.
As Martin says about her process:
"My medium of choice is encaustics .... which gives me the flexibility of discovery. My encaustic surfaces are labored and develop over time. I try to preserve what’s underneath while creating something new with each layer. By scraping wax away, my process turns into an excavation, discovering colors, textures and images. Incorporated into the encaustic paintings are detailed drawings, poetry and original transfer prints."
Martin has entered and exhibited in shows at The vonLeibig Arts Center (Best in Show), Guess-Fisher Gallery, Florida Gulf Coast University, Art League of Ft. Myers, Annual Painting Exhibit at Rookery Bay. Her encaustic work was also selected for The Visual Arts Center of Punta Gorda National Art Exhibition 2012 and The Kolbalt Gallery, Provencetown, MA. She received the Juror's Award for "Save the Elephants" at the All Florida Show at the Alliance for the Arts in Ft. Myers. Her work was accepted in the 9th Annual Encaustic Exhibition at the Conrad Wilde Gallery in Tuscon, AZ. Martin's artists' books have been in four exhibitions at The Abecedarian Gallery, Denver, CO - these books are now in the collection of the University of Miami book art collection and Baylor University Special Collections. Currently, her paintings can be seen at Watson McCrae Gallery on Sanibel Island, FL and Aldecor in North Naples, FL.
Martin received an MFA from the State University of New York at Albany in 1990. Undergraduate work was at Skidmore College where she taught in the art department in the early 1990s. She taught for 10 years at Green Mountain College in Poultney, VT after which opening Gallery 100 in Saratoga Springs, NY which showcased nationally known artists for ten years. Martin now works full time in her studio on Shirley Street, Naples, Florida.
Deborah Martin
