Conflation

A native of Washington State, Cameron Martin is a mid-career painter and printmaker currently living and working in New York City. His principal subject matter consists of landscape and depictions of the natural world, such as leafless trees and tree branches, barren rock formations, isolated mountains, and the surfaces of bodies of water. Martin works in a representational style, but his presentation and method of depiction are unconventional. Martin starts by choosing a theme or subject based on direct observation of nature, then edits and distills his subject to its elemental forms and structures, often layering objects and elements within a shallow pictorial space. His color schemes are generally foreign to the reality of nature as we perceive it, but are instead chosen to carry a specific emotional tenor, reinforcing the concept that these works of art are not intended to be reflections of nature, but are cultural and symbolic representations. Martin often uses a large number of different colors in a single work (40 in this screenprint), but within a very narrow range of hue, relying instead on value and contrast to define his subject. At the same time, he keeps modulation to a minimum, preferring to define space and objects with sharp-edges forms and shapes. As a result, his landscape paintings and prints are highly simplified, or more precisely, distilled to their primary structures and signifiers. They become, in effect, symbolic representations of scenes or objects that are generally quite familiar to the viewer.