Happy Saturday! Today’s Studio Selfie features Pennsylvania artist Brian Martin. Brian is a founding member of the artist group Broad Street Studio (you may remember our show featuring them a few years ago!) and is well known for his landscapes and depictions of suburban scenes. In his artist statement, Brian writes that his work is based on his own experiences of living throughout the country in “typical American neighborhoods.” Having experienced the suburban life that goes beyond the “white picket fence” conception, Brian says that he is interested in creating images which take “the idea of the American suburb and superimposing the twist of my personal memory and perception upon them. My goal is to create psychologically engaging images that are simultaneously familiar and strange.” Full of brilliant color, clever composition, and intriguing light, Brian’s work has a mesmerizing quality that makes many a viewer stop in their tracks to observe it. Check out all his available work on our website here!
10 Questions for the Artist: Brian Martin
- Fill in the blank: Paint is A lot of things: color, light, a vehicle that allows you to communicate ideas or thoughts that words cannot
- Cats/Dogs? Dogs, but I currently have a cat
- Your first car: Ford Escort, color: magenta
- Favorite painting music: it varies, but a lot of indie stuff from when I went to art school
- Your “spirit animal”: Border Collie
- If you could time travel and witness an artist create their masterpiece, which work would you choose? That’s a tough one. Probably Inness, especially his later work. Really hard to decipher his process just looking at the finished product.
- All time favorite movie: E.T., huge influence on me.
- Place you’d love to travel to: Probably Africa, the entire continent, because it’s so different from what I know.
- Morning person or night owl? Night owl, but becoming a dad has forced me to a morning person.
- If I weren’t an artist, I think I’d be in Astronomy. Totally fascinated by it, but never had the math skills.
