Douglas Martenson: The Meadow, Encounter
Location: Gross McCleaf Gallery, 123 Leverington Ave, Philadelphia, PA, 19127
March 20 - April 25, 2026
Gross McCleaf Gallery is pleased to present The Meadow, Encounter, a new solo exhibition by Douglas Martenson. Working from a meadow that he returns to over time, Martenson paints a landscape that is never fixed. It shifts, evolves, and regenerates with light, weather, and season. Working across oil, watercolor, and graphite, Martenson paints from sustained observation. Each image carries the feeling of a chance encounter, as though stumbled upon rather than composed. Wide fields give way to closer moments, where what might otherwise be passed over begins to take hold as the subject.
For Martenson, the meadow is not only a subject but an ongoing site of inquiry. Returning to the same location over time allows him to represent increasingly complex observations, shaped by a deepening familiarity with the land. Some works engage the full expanse of the landscape, while others move closer, focusing on passages: a row of weeds, a brief shift in light, a change in leaf density or color that might otherwise go unnoticed.
This body of work also reflects a shift in Martenson’s approach to image-making. As he describes, “an image takes hold, and all it takes to get there drifts away.” Where earlier work retained more visible traces of process, these paintings allow those traces to recede, leaving the viewer to navigate the image without a fixed path. “As artists we appreciate paintings that show process; it’s like we are let in on the story. When you remove these breadcrumbs, the viewer is left on their own to navigate…opening the work up to more interpretation, more engagement…I want the viewer to feel they know something previously unnoticed.”
Throughout the exhibition, Martenson continues to explore the relationship between humans and their environment, not as separate entities but as overlapping systems. “If we walk on the ground, we affect it—that’s the encounter,” he says. Whether through the presence of figures, cultivated land, or the suggestion of use, traces of human activity remain embedded within the landscape, not separate from it. Each painting holds this tension, offering an intimate view of a place that is always changing.
An in-depth conversation with the artist, by Elizabeth Johnson (edited by Matthew Crain), is available to read on our website, linked here:
Click Here to read Art Sync | Wind, Sun, Time of Day: Conversation with Douglas Martenson
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.