Deborah Martin

Deborah Martin (born June 9, 1961) is a contemporary American Realist Painter and Fine Art Photographer.
Biography
Deborah Martin was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1961, the first of two children and the only daughter. The family lived opposite the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston directly adjacent to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. In 1962, they moved to Houlton, Maine and later to Augusta, Maine. In 1966, they moved to Wayne, Pennsylvania where she was raised until she was twelve years old.
In 1973, the family moved to Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. As a child, Martin spent time with her grandfather on Cape Cod, Massachusetts and from 1995 to 2000 lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Early influences
As a teenager, Martin was first influenced by paintings exhibited at the Brandywine River Museum located in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania by the artists Andrew Wyeth and Jamie Wyeth. She studied a painting by N.C. Wyeth at the age of 16, while attending a Philadelphia College of Art Foundation Program. She was also influenced by the artist Georgia O'Keeffe and worked abstractly in oil pastel on paper from 19902000, although before this her style was predominantly realist.
Education
At the age of 16, Martin won a scholarship to attend Philadelphia College of Art (The University of the Arts) Foundation Program in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The University of the Arts was created in 1985 by a merger of the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts (PCPA) and the Philadelphia College of Art (PCA), two schools that trace their origins to the 1870s.
Martin received a full scholarship to attend The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University, where she received her BFA and Master of Arts in teaching, BS Art Education, in 1992.
Career
After graduating in 1992, Martin moved to New York City and began exploring photography as a creative medium using a Pentax K1000 to shoot a series on Coney Island, mainly in black and white. She was deeply influenced by the work of Nan Goldin (also a graduate from the Museum School and Tufts University), an American fine art and documentary photographer whose work I'll Be Your Mirror was exhibited at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 1997. Goldin documented the underground scene of Provincetown. Martin's friends were among the subjects of Nan's book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986).
From 1998 to 1999 the Driskel Gallery at the School House in Provincetown exhibited Martin's photographic work. In 1998, her series Pure documented the bond between three infants and their parents. In 1999 her series Polaroids represented her first use of Polaroid 600 film as a photographic medium.
In 2000, Martin moved across the country to Venice, California, and later settled in Echo Park, California. Martin restored a studio space (Studio 528) in the Spring Arts Tower building located in downtown Los Angeles in the historic Old Bank District where she currently works. In 2006, Martin returned to realism and began painting in oil on canvas from a series of Polaroids taken on a road trip through Slaton, Texas.
It was not until 2007 that Martin began to use Polaroid 600 film as direct historical documentation for her paintings. Martin occasionally uses a Holga. A 2007 road trip across the country from the outermost tip of Cape Cod to Los Angeles became the basis for the well-received series titled America. She began translating these Polaroids into oil paintings for her first solo show which opened in Los Angeles in February 2009.
Martin's restoration work can be seen on the ceiling of the Cathedral of Saint Vibiana, which she restored in 2005, and throughout the Spring Arts Tower in downtown Los Angeles. In 2006, Martin founded the Spring Arts Collective Gallery located on the Mezzanine of the Spring Arts Tower on Gallery Row, with a small group of artists that she directed until January 2009. In March 2009, Martin left the Mezzanine to open the Deborah Martin Gallery located on the ground level of the Spring Arts Tower. In September 2009, Martin founded the Downtown Los Angeles Galleries Association.
In her continued exploration of American landscapes, Martin turned her attention to two landmark saline sites in the United States known for their distinctive inhabitants, unorthodox social ecology, and unique architecture: the Salton Sea and the Outer Cape area of Cape Cod. Home on the Strange: In Search of the Salton Sea is a collaborative project with writer Amy Sather Smith and video artist Juli Vizza. It is based on Polaroid photographs taken over four years, depicting various aspects of real life on the Salton Sea. The Narrow Lands, a collaboration with writer and artist Quintan Ana Wikswo, is a cross-discipline project documenting the architectural geography of history and time along the Outer Cape.
Martin was recently selected as a featured artist in New American Paintings Magazine representing the Pacific West Coast.
Home on The Strange: In Search of the Salton Sea opens February 11, 2010 at the Deborah Martin Gallery in Downtown Los Angeles.

Martin's noirish and oddly poignant images offer a hauntingly intimate elegy for small town American roadsides, refracted through a grim cataract of muffled sunlight, dusty colors, and bleached, exhausted exposures. Her vacant neighborhoods suggest a peaceful, bucolic apocalypse in which human abandonment is perhaps as much blessing as curse.Her work dwells within a compositional formality - a visitor's sidewalk stance that captures the essentially public vista of driveway, yard, front porch - yet her portraitist's eye conjures an emotional complexity nearly operatic in scope: within the silent, vacant architecture, human drama seems to exist more powerfully in allusion.Quintan Ana Wikswo
Works
* Pure
* America
* Home on the Strange: In Search of the Salton Sea
* The Narrow Lands
Bibliography
* (2010) New American Paintings Magazine issue (No 85), Juried by Dominic Molon, Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
* (2010) Blue Canvas Magazine, issue (No 4) January, 2010
* (2009) Angeleno Magazine, July, 09, Los Angeles, CA
* (2009) Light Leaks Magazine, Road Trip Issue, April, 09
* (2009) LA2OC Emphasis Extreme (exhibition catalogue), Orange County Center for Contemporary Art
* (2009) Citizen LA, Andie Villefane, page 8, Feb 09, Los Angeles, CA
* (2009) Flavor Pill, Shana Nys Dambrot, July, 09, Los Angeles, CA
* (2009) Downtown LA Life Magazine, Dale Youngman, March, 09, Los Angeles, CA
* (2009) Flavor Pill, Kristen Freidrek, February 12, 09, Los Angeles, CA
* (2008) New American Paintings Studio Visit Magazine (Vol 4), Juried by Carl Belz Director Emeritus of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University and managing editor of Art New England Magazine.
* (2008) Light Leaks Magazine, Polaroid Issue, October,09
* (2007) Downtown News, Anna Scott, October 09, Los Angeles, CA
* (2005) Downtown News, St. Vibiana's Cathedral, November, 05, Los Angeles, CA
* (1998) Cape Cod Times "Best Bet" Through a Woman's Eyes, October 16, 98, Cape Cod, MA
* (1998) The Cape Codder, Jennifer Hagar, October 16, page 31, Cape Cod, MA

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