Oh boy, I’m very excited. You know I go thru the highest of highs, then crash to the ground? Well, this time I’m doing something good for my future as a fine artist…I’ve been accepted to study classical art under a great Artist: Eduardo Salazar!! I am over the moon! I know it will take years of dedicated study, but I will soar to new heights.,.All the beautiful images in my head will have new ways to be rendered in my hands, with my new skills, new ways of seeing.
I dreamed, ALL MY LIFE, to study under a great Artist…now , finally, this dream is reality. I hope you will come along on this incredible journey,!
DOOR MURAL , 2018DETAIL, DOOR MURAL, 2018DETAIL, DOOR MURAL, 2018SHED MURAL IN PROGRESSMural Idea, 2016SHED MURAL PROGRESS)Reaching Out, acrylic on canvas, Work in Progress, Susan T. Martin 2017Last Years Insights II WINNING Entry!A long way from painting on bridges, but I still long for a blank wall!!
Mural painting is fine art today. Just as great frescoes in the days of Michelangelo, and centuries before, large scale art is an artist’s dream. Is that why children inevitable write in crayon on the playroom walls?
I am sure of this: As long as I have been able to appreciate fine art and my burning desire to depict what I see thru it: I have wanted to paint murals. At times, in my youth, I exercised this need, painting in spray enamel on any available wall in the dead of night. “HELLO WORLD!” in six foot tall red letters over a grinning, fanged 30 foot tall caricature, scrawled on an underpass along I-95 southbound. Painted in 1985, before the Interstate had even made it to West Palm beach. Ah, what satisfaction to drive by it in the backseat of Dad’s Mazda, grinning silently.
These were days before I heard of graffiti culture, I was a transplant to the largely undeveloped east coast of Florida an hour north of Fort Lauderdale. These were the days when the County Sherriff had bricks of coke and bales of weed being dropped on his private airstrip a few miles north of my house. I hung out with a bunch of dudes who owned a race car shop, building mid-engine Mustangs and drag racing on Glades Cut-off Road.
Before Race-day one weekend, the boys let me use all the leftover spraypaint in the shop to paint huge murals of fire breathing dragons and heavy metal chicks everywhere. I was high on life, and probably paint fumes and Columbian gold. What a rush, the guys all in amazement at my grand design. Now I was a real artist, a legend at the shop, “The Girl Who Painted Barrel Road “. Now I knew how Michelangelo must have felt when he unveiled the Sistine Chapel for the Pope! (Unveiled it? How, exactly?) Well, anyway, it felt cool.
FASTFORWARD NOW, 25 years clean and sober, a professionally recognized fine artist in my own right. Now living in St. Petersburg, Florida which hosts the annual “SHINE” mural festival, an event which brings mural artists and fans from all over the globe, and I’m still dreaming.
I know it will happen, I will have a wall to call my own. I will keep pushing, keep striving, keep believing. After all, I was born on the sixth day of March- the same day as Michelangelo!
I must say, Covid was no picnic. But I have much to be grateful for, so I won’t whine. My work is selling and I am in 3 gallery shows at once…reason to DANCE and SHOUT! This Saturday, October 8th,2022 is ArtWalk. I am excited to AGAIN have work at
Five Deuces Galleria! The show is entitled “BLACK and WHITE with a Touch of Color”, and I love the theme. It really had me pushing myself to new artistic heights and I created the BEST Suncatcher to date! Unfortunately, my Surface Pro is in the throes of Death, so I can’t post an image just yet. But I will, never fear, Dear Reader! I’m back in Black and White, better than EVER!
This painting, “Ad Infinitum”, is a commentary of my journey from Alcoholism, Drug Addiction, Sexual Assault, Domestic Violence and Childhood Sexual Assault, Self-Loathing and Suicidal Ideation to a Life of Freedom and Acceptance of the person I was. As a person with Rapid Cycling Bipolar Disorder, and PTSD , this journey was arduous and excruciatingly painful.
This work has been juried into the ” 2021 Women In Art”, an online show honoring women artists for the month of March, at Las Laguna Art Gallery, Laguna Beach, California. You can view this show online at laslagunartgallery.com March 4-27,2021 Description of Work: As a Bipolar Artist I have always portrayed my duality in my work unconsciously at first, way before any diagnosis. I painted this as an entry to The Ryan Licht Sang Bipolar Foundations Insights IV Art Show in 2019, the theme being Self Portraits. As such all the women in the image are different facets of the Artist. On the Left side of the image in gilt and green vines we find a woman hanging on a stake, paying for her crimes.
Center Bottom is the past self (as I described initially here). We see that she is dark overall, and notably, wearing a mask and full of confusing puzzle-like pieces and disjointed lines. In fact even her hair is like the pages of a book that holds her many secrets. There are signs she has been in bondage, chains, shackles, even some kind of demon-like being can be seen lurking inside, still biting her(shoulder region).This collection of symbols indicate not only abuse, but also the bondage of addiction and codependency. She smiles up at the healed self who is lifting her out of the mire. Her condition had become so dire, that we see a tiny version of self scrambling up the stairs in her forearm to escape, with a look of terror on her face. That is not a shirt the lower self wears, it is her skin, which has to peeled off to reveal the clean inner person she is becoming.
Around the lower self’s neck, central to the painting we see a venomous snake, usually a symbol of evil in art, for centuries. But rather than striking, it is benevolent ( after all it is pink!) An “inside joke” on the Artist’s part, as she was bitten by a Pygmy Rattlesnake on July 5, 1985 and then by a Copperhead on August 10, 1995, which very nearly cost her her life.
BUT SHE LIVED, and now that all the other venom of her past is purged, SHE IS LIVING A JOYFUL LIFE NOW! As far as the child in the right-hand corner, that needs no explanation, nor does the love on the face of the Healed Self.
This Mixed Media Painting by Susan T. Martin is Entitled, “A Wee Bit Peckish”
Using Simultaneity and Surrealism I morph my feelings and emotions into birds, fish, and an outpouring of faces, each expressing the myriad emotions I go thru each day as a person living with PTSD and Bipolar Disorder.I wonder how many animals you can find? It’s like a little joyride into my manic mind!
Out of the Gutter Art 
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