Douglas Martenson: The Meadow, Encounter
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 21, 1-4 pm
On View: March 20 - April 25
Location: Gross McCleaf Gallery, The Mill Studios, 123 Leverington Ave, Philadelphia, PA
Visitor parking is located in The Mill Studios lot, accessible from Leverington Avenue.
Milkweed Afternoon, Oil on canvas, 24" x 18"
"This exhibition begins with views of the meadow, or clearing, a place in continual transition. A meadow is never fixed. It shifts, evolves, and regenerates, it is a complex ecosystem: a layered community of wildlife and wild plants. Interwoven with traces of human presence - abandoned pastures, old apple groves, with narrow paths that may lead to the ocean.
The meadow exists at the edge, where woodland meets open land. The meadow is an interface, a threshold that supports a diverse range of sun seeking plants, these offer shelter, continually moving with quiet activity. It is a place of transition rather than resolution.
The paintings are attentive to fleeting moments: light falling across leaves for only an instant, a shift in color or density that might pass unnoticed unless one is fully present. They ask whether we pause long enough to register these encounters - whether beauty lies in harmony, tension, or simply in attention itself. Each work carries the feeling of a chance encounter, as though stumbled upon rather than arranged, inviting the viewer into a moment that is already changing."
- Douglas Martenson
Push, Oil on wood, 12" x 16"
About the Artist
Douglas Martenson has made his home in Philadelphia since 1978 and is a Graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His studio is a three story row house located in the Dickenson square area of Philadelphia and the house he rents in Maine is an old farm house located on seventeen acres facing Cadillac Mountain. Martenson has been the recipient of many grants and awards including a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship, several Individual Creative Opportunity stipends from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Pew fellowship on the Arts grant for study at the Vermont studio center in northern Vermont, and a Cresson European Traveling Scholarship from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He has exhibited widely and shows his work regularly in New York, Philadelphia and Boston. Martenson has recently curated two exhibitions for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Landscapes Modern to Contemporary (2019) and The Artist’s Response to Nature: Tonalism, Historical to Contemporary (2016). Martenson was a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania and is a Professor of Fine Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.






