BILL MARTIN - Mendocino Art Center
BILL MARTIN - Mendocino Art Center
BILL MARTIN - Mendocino Art Center
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Sphinx Moth<br />
ing took too much time away from his<br />
painting. He recently created a website, www.guidetooilpainting.com,<br />
to help others learn to paint and to give<br />
himself more time to devote to his own work.<br />
Bill considers his best and most influential teachers<br />
the artists of the Hudson River School, Albert<br />
Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, Thomas Moran, Edwin<br />
Church and other notables. The Hudson River School<br />
was hugely unpopular at the time Bill was<br />
developing as an artist. Nonetheless,<br />
Bill was profoundly influenced by<br />
this group. “They were doing<br />
what I wanted to do. I was<br />
impressed by the scale of<br />
their paintings and their<br />
ability to create depth and<br />
luminescence. I didn’t<br />
want to just paint pretty<br />
pictures. I was looking<br />
for something more.”<br />
Bill is driven to create<br />
paintings with big<br />
themes and what at first<br />
glance appear to be opposing<br />
forces: birth and death, fire<br />
and ice, creation and destruction,<br />
good and evil, the micro<br />
and the macro. But, after closer examination,<br />
the viewer gets to experience<br />
Oracle Fire<br />
how these opposing forces merge into<br />
the whole, or what Bill often refers to as a “unified<br />
vision.” Bill views painting as an ongoing challenge,<br />
a journey and a quest, rather than an end in itself.<br />
Each painting represents an enormous commitment<br />
in time and effort. Many of Bill’s paintings take years<br />
to complete.<br />
Much of Bill’s imagery focuses on transitions<br />
and transformations. Bill has faced many life-threatening<br />
health challenges and at the time of<br />
this interview, he is undergoing chemotherapy.<br />
So the issues of life, death<br />
and transformation are personally<br />
relevant to him. His painting,<br />
“Between Worlds,” depicts our<br />
brief moment on this planet,<br />
and yet connects us to the<br />
infinite.<br />
What does Bill want<br />
the viewer to experience<br />
when looking at one of his<br />
paintings? He wants us to<br />
feel the interconnectedness of<br />
all things. He hopes we will<br />
find something in ourselves that<br />
makes us feel larger, that lifts our<br />
spirits in a strong, positive way, and<br />
leaves us feeling that meaningful personal<br />
growth is possible. His work<br />
can be viewed on his online gallery:<br />
www.billmartingallery.com.<br />
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