Cameron Martin's visual vocabulary primarily deals in rocks, trees and water.
These elements form the basis of the images he created during his January 2003 visit to
Tandem Press. They are derived in part from the landscape he experienced while growing
up in Seattle.
"I was surrounded by the imagery of nature," Martin noted. "There was an element of
grandeur, of the sublime. It was something you couldn't overcome, something which
contained awe, beauty, and terror."
He carried these impressions with him as he moved east at the beginning of the 1990s to
study at Brown University. He progressively transformed his perspective, adopting
"a pop cultural way of looking at nature." The pop culture connection was an
integral part of his growing up in Seattle during the 1980s when he was a competitive skateboarder and a member of a rock band.
His focus on art came when he started painting in the mid 1990s when he settled in Brooklyn, New York and was chosen to participate in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. At this point, the source for his paintings was not the nature of the Seattle environment but the photographs of Carleton Watkins, Edward Weston and Roger Fenton, He also borrowed images from popular advertisements promoting products such as beer, clothing, tobacco, timepieces, and movies and took his own photographs to provide an additional source of reference. Martin later augmented his point of view during the summer of 2001 when he was awarded a residency at MonetŐs home and studio in Giverny, France. On that occasion he concentrated not on MonetŐs gardens, but on his collection of Japanese ukiyo-e prints.
To accentuate his reductive approach, Martin uses different kinds of paint to achieve the distinctive effects that characterize his images. The paints include: oil, alkyd, acrylic, and interference paint used in automobile detailing work. The latter has a metallic sheen. When it is applied in layers it becomes opaque and creates a luminous surface that lends a sense of volume to what is being portrayed. The rocks become lumpy masses. The trunks and limbs of trees are skeleton bones reaching for the sky and the surface of the water reads like a shimmering film over a fathomless deep.
