Fred Martin

Art Brokerage: Fred Martin American Artist: b. 1927. Fred Thomas Martin is an American artist, writer and former arts administrator and educator who has been active in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene since the late 1940s.He was a driving force of the Bay Area art scene from the mid 1950s until his recent retirement from the San Francisco Art Institute. In addition to his artistic practice, Martin is widely known for his work as a longtime administrator and Professor Emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). When Martin began painting in the late 1940s, he used oil paint or house paint to create semi-abstracted scenes based on real and imagined imagery. At times these works ventured into action painting; other works, however, were created with a Chinese sumi brush, and focused more on calligraphic brushstrokes as figures and objects developed among various textures.. Writing on Martin's work in a 1973 SFMoMA catalog, curator Suzanne Foley notes that his artistic style developed as he was studying with David Park, who emphasized "compositional simplicity", while also receiving "the greatest direction" from the "'beat' ambiance" of the time, which spoke to "Fred Martin's sensitivity". Martin's work reflects his broad and diverse range of interests, including Jungian psychology. Over the years, much of his art has contained autobiographical details often in the form of symbols or anthropomorphic imagery. Poppies, for example, represent his first wife, Jean, who was also an artist, while grain, seeds, and phallic symbols allude to regeneration. Listings wanted.