Paintings

Brent Martin began landscape painting while living in Santa Monica in 2013. Humans have mapped, photographed, and carved up our entire planet. There is no landscape that has not been heavily reconstructed or modified by us. These pictures attempt to capture some of that mood. Starting in the LA basin and the southern San Joaquin Valley, these first paintings capture our cellular life in cars traversing the American West, from city to the rural farms and oil fields. After moving north to San Francisco, the subject shifted. Here pastels paint the northern Sacramento Valley near Colusa. In the Delevan and Colusa National Wildlife Refuge, the rice fields have been intentionally flooded and turned back into landing places for migratory birds. The landscape is an overlay of Thomas Jefferson’s rectangular survey system, industrial agriculture, and faux natural bird habitat in its last iteration. Huge flocks of birds sweep across the sky. Bird watchers and bird hunters split the reserve between their interests, mingling in the parking lot before going off in separate directions to capture birds via lens or rifle. Moving west along Highway 20 toward Clearlake one encounters the Bear Valley Hills and the Bear and Oat Valleys. These hills have distinct and regular rippling from geologic folding, giving some of the pastels regular folded forms repeating into the distance.