AMERICA MARTIN - POP - UP at the Carver Hill Gallery: July 2021
Columbian American artist America Martin returns for a solo show at The Yellow Boathouse, our Pop-Up location at 20 Winter Street in Rockland, Maine, across from CMCA (Center for Maine Contemporary Art Museum). America will be coming in from Los Angeles and is looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones. The show will open with fantastic art and music on Friday, July 2, 2021 from 5 – 7:30 pm and will run daily from 11 – 5 through July 25th.
This show is an amalgam of America's Colombian roots and the inspiration she finds in her reading and her travels. She pulls from the stylistic lessons of the classics and its derivations in indigenous subject matter, while redefining what it is to combine abstract and indigenous motifs.
America’s mantra is “YES”, her sentiment toward living life to the fullest. Yes to experiences, yes to inclusion, yes to helping, yes to participating. She is a perpetually positive person and painter, and her work is an expression of this optimism. As a child, passion was expected of America. Boredom was never tolerated, and she learned to be a seeker of colors and shapes and sounds that excited her.
The figures she explores in her work are defined by bold lines on top of geometric fields of color. When she puts these color fields down on the surface she creates balanced abstractions that can actually stand alone, but America visualizes her figure prior to putting these shapes of color down. Her lines are incredibly brave and confident – a figure is often created with just a few marks. The final expression is awe inspiring, the colors beneath the line create weight, movement, and temperature. They are brilliantly, but intuitively, planned . The work becomes less about the subjects themselves and more about how they translate a feeling or expression for the viewer. She is painting emotion.
Carver Hill Gallery has represented America Martin for 11 years. It has been three years since her last show in Rockland and we are thrilled to bring her back for another solo show in Maine. After July 19 the work will move to the gallery’s permanent location at 28 Bayview Street in Camden.