Artist Spotlight: Douglas Martenson
“I would like to give the impression of a passing glance; in other paintings, I am encouraging a longer reflection. Working within traditions while challenging the viewer, I hope to lure spectators into an extended reflection and contemplation. - Douglas Martenson
Is art about the materials that you use or is it how you use your materials to say something that will speak for your time and hopefully become a universal statement?…In many of my recent works, I have taken a closer look at the plants, wildflowers, and weed clusters throughout the field, looking more deeply at something that you often overlook.
All together, my work evokes a much larger idea, that being the nature of our existence. And above all, the Pennsylvania, New York, and Maine topography serve as the most important foil, allowing me to highlight and express these concerns.”
“My paintings are like portals into worlds familiar and strange; mysterious, intriguing and sublime. Poetic and metaphorical, my work reveals the visual truth of perception, capturing not only the quality of light or the tonal harmonies of a particular scene, but also its mood and the wonder of vision itself.”
— Douglas Martenson
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 NewYork, Philadelphia and Boston galleries.
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 Professorof of Fine Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.