Freaks, Floozies Inhabit James Martin's Art

----------- Martin show -----------

A show of James Martin's recent work is on view at Foster/White Gallery in Kirkland, 126 Kirkland Way, through Oct. 10. Hours are Mondays through Wednesdays, 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Thursdays through Saturdays, 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 425-822-2305

Ask James Martin a simple question and then sit back. Ten minutes later, he'll be careening along on a bantering, free-fall monologue that might connect Picasso's mistress Dora Maar to the late crooner Tiny Tim, then moves on to a poem by Theodore Roethke, the antics of neighborhood cats, a letter from Morris Graves, and a few choice tidbits about waitresses Martin has known.

Interspersed with the anecdotes will be looks of amazement, lecherous chuckles, and the occasional "Huh? Isn't that right?" But before you can re-engage your faculty of speech to answer, Martin will leave you in the dust.

If you visit Martin's current show at Foster/White Gallery in Kirkland, you'll see that he paints just like he talks. The stuff pours out of him. His narrative gouache-on-paper paintings, done with a cagey kind of slapdash bravado, sport a cast of characters that may strike some people as naive or cartoonish.

Among his admirers, though, they inspire a cultlike fervor. Martin collectors grab up the paintings like potato chips - often crowding the walls of their homes with a dozen or more. Yet, oddly, for a sizeable portion of the art-viewing public, Martin is still unknown - even though he has been exhibiting regularly in the Northwest for 35 years. At the age of 71, he has had one of the strangest careers in Northwest art.

Martin is often discounted in serious art circles because here, in the land of the Northwest mystics, he got hooked on the outrageous. He stays up late at night listening to the radical opinions on Art Bell's radio talk show. He sees the Jerry Springer show as a new form of burlesque. He transforms the daily input of the media into the wild stream-of-consciousness of his paintings - for him both a compulsive kind of storytelling and a way of escape.

"Painting is just another virtual reality," he maintains, "like the (damn) Internet." And seeking out the absurd is a way of laughing at a world that might otherwise be a little too painful to take.

Martin grew up in Ballard, an only child. His father was a railroad engineer and his mother died of cancer when he was 20. As a young teenager, Martin spent a week at reform school for stealing a car. "It wasn't the only one I took for a ride," he recalls, "but I didn't always get caught."

After dropping out of Ballard High, Martin apprenticed as a mechanic for a year, then worked at auto wrecking yards while he finished his high-school degree at the YMCA. Even in those days, he was spending his spare time in a small art studio he had set up in the basement coal room of the family home.

You might not guess it right away, but Martin is a true believer in the Northwest School. He speaks reverently of Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and Guy Anderson, dubbed by Life magazine in the 1950s as "the mystic painters of the Northwest." At the beginning of his career, Martin tried to emulate them. Yet somehow, when it came to putting paint to paper, he just couldn't get the mystic thing right.

Martin - who also counts Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger as heroes - believes humor is the ultimate reality. "If you fall into the tragic trap," he says, "you've got to pick up and laugh at it. But before you can laugh at tragedy, you've got to experience it."

Martin first showed his paintings in the 1960s at the Otto Seligman Gallery, where his work was admired and purchased by Dr. Richard Fuller, founder of the Seattle Art Museum; William Boeing Jr.; actor Charles Laughton; Manfred Selig, an art collector and the father of developer Martin Selig; and Mark Tobey. It was there Martin met Tobey, and, like many younger artists, fell under the spell of his charm and stylistic innovations. Martin also borrowed like mad from the European modernists, grabbing imagery from Chagall, Picasso, van Gogh, Manet and Renoir. You can still see bits of it in his work.

But the real source of Martin's mature style traces back to his school days at Ballard High. There, he was encouraged by the eccentric instruction of Orre Nobles, an influential art teacher who also helped start the art careers of other Ballard students who later became well-known local artists: Richard Gilkey, Jack Stangel and Art Hansen. For kids who didn't fit the mold in that blue-collar neighborhood, Nobles' art classes were a revelation and a godsend.

Nobles taught Martin the basics of drawing, printmaking and design. But his teaching didn't influence Martin's outlook as much as what the headstrong teenager learned on his own, outside class. Some days, he would cut school with a buddy and head downtown to the Rivoli Theater to watch the burlesque shows.

"I used to sit up front and look at those torn and dirty costumes," he recalls. "Even the women had costumes that were torn and dirty; and they all had red hair, even the clown. Some of them were hookers, I think. We were just voyeurs."

Later, after graduating from the University of Washington, where he dabbled in art and studied creative writing, Martin started painting seriously. Imagery from the burlesque soon began to percolate into his work, even though he tried hard at first to channel it into something resembling Tobey's market scenes or Graves' heightened visions of the natural world. It just didn't work. When Martin paints a Northwest landscape, it's likely to be peopled with freaks and floozies. Mysticism turns to Silly Putty in his hands.

At first he fought it. He idolized Graves and moved to Edmonds, hoping that just being near him would have a positive effect on his painting. He bought the only piece of property he could afford, a cheap parcel of swampland off the main highway, and, like Graves, built his own place. Instead of the high aestheticism of Graves' retreat at Woodway, though, Martin's studio ended up shaped by a goofy fervor that fits its name: "The Donald Duck Ranch."

Martin's paintings, which have grown more confident and vital over the years, still bristle with the ambiguities of burlesque and the black humor of slapstick. Stylistically, the work is akin to the feverish brushwork and bawdy sensuality of the German expressionists. But Martin deliberately undermines the concept of "fine art," with its archivally correct materials and systematically escalating prices, for a kind of subversive Everyman's approach to painting that just won't fit the usual categories.