Los Angeles-based painter Heather Gwen Martin works at the edge of hard abstraction — where color becomes almost physical, with flourishes of elegant movement akin to dancing. Her palette is hot and bright, with hand-mixed tones that play off each …
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About the Artwork
Trace marks a significant moment — Heather Gwen Martin’s first foray into printmaking, created in collaboration with master printer Phil Sanders at PS Marlowe Studios in Asheville, North Carolina.
The process was new territory for Martin, whose paintings are built through slow, muscular resistance — the drag of a brush against linen, the precise pull of a loaded stroke. In the studio, she encountered something different: the wild, out-of-control feeling of painting ink on film for silkscreen, faster than her arm had ever moved; and the slow, reckless resistance of carving linoleum for the linocut sections, which felt, she says, closest to the physical endurance of painting itself.
The result is a work that carries the full force of her studio practice — hot color, asymmetrical movement, forms that expand and contract, push forward and recede — distilled into an intimate scale meant to be lived with, and to reveal itself differently over time.
