Levitating Sailor and Seattle Floozies, 1998 Collection of Jules and Judy Chaikin Painter James Martin picked up the image of the sailor from Seattle artist Fay Jones, whose work he admires. The floozies date back to the days when he would cut class at Ballard High School and go to the burlesque shows at the old Rivoli Theater on Seattle's First Avenue.

Some people peg Martin as a cartoonist or outsider artist; but when he started his career, in the 1950s and '60s, his work hung alongside that of the top painters of the day in shows at the Seattle Art Museum. "Mysticism" was the buzzword in the region's art circles, and Martin (like so many others) fell under the influence of Northwest School painters like Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and Guy Anderson. He also played fast and loose with images he stole from European painters such as Chagall, Picasso and Van Gogh. Sometimes Martin - who grew up in Ballard and moved to Edmonds in the mid-1960s - would copy and transform the work of his partner, Helen Reynolds, a commercial photographer who shot portraits of Martin in his various guises. The two lived together until Reynolds' death in 1995.

Putting together a book on Martin was an uphill battle, a feat of detective work and perseverance. Of all the artists I know, Martin is the least concerned with keeping records. When I met him in the mid-1990s, he had no slides, no bibliography, no résumé to speak of. He had few records of the many collectors who own his work. For those, and a dozen other reasons, he has turned into the region's most under-appreciated artist. It's my hope that the book, excerpted below, will do something to remedy that.

"James Martin: Art Rustler at the Rivoli," by Sheila Farr (Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, in association with University of Washington Press, Seattle; copyright 2001 by Sheila Farr). Reprinted with permission.

Art Rustler at the Rivoli

EVEN THOUGH European modernism plays a big role in James Martin's work and the painters of the Northwest School inspire him, the real source of his mature style, which began to emerge in the 1970s, traces back to his days at Ballard High School. Martin learned the basics of drawing, printmaking and design in the classroom, but trained his eye bumming around on his own, away from school. Some days, he would cut class with a buddy and head downtown to the Rivoli Theatre on First Avenue 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."

Self Portrait, 1968 Collection of Barbara and Jack Thomas, Seattle		Martin in a double-tall Stetson, 1968 Photo by Helen Reynolds
Left: This is one of Martin's earliest self-portraits. Right: After seeing a man wearing a top hat pose for a photograph, Martin decided to make one for himself. In many of his paintings from the 1960s and '70s, you can spot the artist wearing this hat. Recently, when asked about it, he said, "Hey, I was thinking - a hat like that is kind of phallic, isn't it?"

The surrealism of those shows percolated into Martin's psyche, and his paintings - once he finally began to trust his own view of things - began to sprout the ambiguities of burlesque and the black humor of slapstick. Now when Martin paints a Northwest scene, it's likely to be peopled with freaks and floozies. Mysticism turns to Silly Putty in his hands. Much as Martin admires the work of Northwest School painters like Anderson and Graves, the realities he encounters in his daily life in Edmonds strike him as more crazy than sublime. "Arles (van Gogh's home in France) has got romance," Martin says, "but Edmonds doesn't. Edmonds is the damnedest place I've ever seen."

If Martin's style looks casual and cartoonish, it's because that's what he aims for. Humor is catharsis. But he chooses his images with a sophisticated eye and a poet's ability to extract the essential material from every scene he encounters. He finds Andy Warhol as a person more fascinating than some of the pictures he made. "People always try to understand him through the Campbell's Soup cans," Martin says. "What about the other aspects? They don't say, like Ultra Violet (Warhol's sidekick) did, that he had a snap implanted on his forehead to keep the wigs on."

Hotel Ocelot, 1982 Collection of Lamar and Marlys Efaw One of Martin's favorite alter-egos, the lion, drapes across a Seattle landmark.

One day when Martin went to the Seattle Art Museum's Modern Art Pavilion at the Seattle Center, he saw Warhol standing there in the gallery, chatting with some people. "I walked in and thought: My God, that's Andy. When you see or read or hear different things, it's kind of a challenge to find out if you can re-create the effect. I've tried many times to paint his wig. It's like wild straw."

Wherever Martin looks, he finds absurdity, so why not take it a step further? "I try to think of things that I haven't seen or heard," he says. "I think, `Now this would be interesting for people to see.' It's kind of like growing plants and making a hybrid - a crossbreed!" That's a perfect description of what Martin did in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he began reshaping famous art historical images. It was a big shift from his early stylistic mimicking. Now Martin had found a manner of painting that was recognizably his own and was setting out - much like Don Quixote - on a virtual quest: a search for the holy grail of art.

Fruitwood Ceiling, 1993 Collection of Gretchen Boeing A chest of drawers that belonged to his grandmother shows up over and over in Martin's work, the top drawer always open.

Cow on the Ceiling of the First Baptist Church, 1991 Collection of Leo Michelson At 14 by 17 inches, this painting is typical of the modest scale of Martin's work.

THE STYLE OF Martin's work, his way of applying paint, has changed considerably over the years. His earliest work, from the 1950s, is the most delicately rendered and refined. During the 1960s, Martin turned his focus to storytelling and patched together a unique manner of expression out of his myriad influences. He moved to bigger paintbrushes and bolder strokes. In the 1970s, his imagery unraveled into a sketchy jumble of figures or architectural forms almost tauntingly incoherent, flashing patches of bare paper through watery paint. The paper he used was sometimes pulp-colored, or he'd paint on masonite (Martin's materials have always been cheap) instead of the brown utility paper that's become his trademark. By the 1980s, Martin's paint application grew denser again, the color more saturated and his figures more defined. He began to tinker with composition and the relationship of objects, employing an expanding cast of actors and acrobats, freaks and floozies, artists and friends to work the crowds for him.

Martin has never tried to create a natural perspective, but rather a sense of the uncanny way events and images bunch up together in memory and imagination. Often, he paints his people with their noses pressed up against the picture plane, confronting us like the cluster of shades that met Odysseus at the mouth of the underworld.

When Martin began his career, he imitated other artists' palettes as well as their styles. He could do the razzle-dazzle of Paul Klee; he could do the Northwest gloom of Mark Tobey. In the late 1960s, to please Helen, who loved flowers, Martin began to use color as a gift, painting luscious bouquets for her. But by the 1980s, he had caught on that color is more than beauty or personal style - it has meaning, too - so that by the 1990s, Martin had at his fingertips a juicy vocabulary of color. It stands out in paintings like "Fruitwood Ceiling," in which he uses color to speak volumes when his imagery is at its most minimal. The gaping dresser drawer, the empty basin, the oval void of the mirror, when enveloped in pink and rusty red, upset the innocent image of a young girl's room and suggest instead a defloration. "Painting is like theater," Martin says. "You can create a story, a scene. Sometimes you can even create a dialogue."

Still Life - Inkwell, 1985 Collection of Kent K. Mathews and Brian M. Riney One of Martin's many tributes to (and spoofs of) his hero, the late Northwest painter Morris Graves.

Martin has always painted in volume, preferring the immediacy of gesture and stream of consciousness to a prolonged, formal process. He tends to work small, so he can usually start and finish a painting in a day or two. If it doesn't come together by then, he throws it on a pile, which he later mines for any gems. He frames the work himself, with the cheapest possible frame stock, purchased in bulk. People - including Martin himself - marvel at how the work transforms when it is considerately reframed. But that doesn't matter; he just keeps doing it the same old way.

AT SOME POINT fairly early in his career, Martin abandoned the urge for technical finesse to the immediacy of emotional response, not because he doesn't admire superb technique, but because it doesn't suit who he is and what he has to say. He is still conflicted over how his ingrained blue-collar work ethic and the artistic marketplace fit together. "That's the Gordian knot," he admitted recently.

Bed and Bath at Arles, 1998 This painting is from a series of take-offs Martin did on Vincent van Gogh's famous paintings of his bedroom at Arles, France. "Arles has got romance," Martin says. "Edmonds doesn't."

He feels guilty unless he has a lot to show for his time in the studio. He can't overcome the manufacturing mentality, even though he firmly believes that art should be a sacred endeavor. Maybe that's why Warhol's unabashed commercialism and his art studio, the Factory, hold a fascination for Martin. He likes to produce, and he likes the affirmation of having his work sell - even though he steadfastly refuses to take part in marketing it. Over the years, that sensibility has led him to manufacture his fair share of insignificant work. But the amazing thing is, with so much stuffed out there, how many of those paintings still seem startlingly fresh. Maybe that's because, for Martin, the work is always in process. "I didn't learn how to paint until last year," he maintains. "I know it sounds funny, but even now I think the best is still to come."

Unlike other creative people I know, Martin never appears to suffer from blocks or anxiety about producing. The tap is always running. I attribute this to the fact that he adamantly refuses to participate in the business aspect of his career. He just can't handle it. "We all go through the stage of worrying about money," Martin says. "But I've never wanted more than the necessities - food and shelter. As the culture changes, luxuries become necessities: a car, for example, or a phone. It has to do with the life you choose to lead and your destiny. If you're worried about debt, you're robbing yourself of the time to do something else. I'm selfish with my time."

Martin leaves his imagination free to flit among absurdities and profundities, which seem - at least in his Edmonds neighborhood - to travel together in flocks. This, I think, stirs up the addictive substance that's been commented on in Martin paintings: Each one seems so amazing, it makes a little buzz in your brain - you think you just have to have it. Then you see the next one, and it's more remarkable still. If you pass it up, you know you'll be thinking of nothing else. Martin may not have the focused concentration, the intense discipline to achieve the kind of heroic greatness of the artists he most admires. But what he has instead is the hit-and-run sagacity of a Shakespearean fool - a character who often enough steals the show.

Like his hero, Morris Graves, Martin built a home for himself in Edmonds. But instead of the high aestheticism of Graves' retreat at Woodway Park, Martin's studio ended up shaped by a goofy fervor that fit the name he chose, the Donald Duck Ranch.
		Martin at the Donald Duck Ranch, 1999 Photo by Spike Mafford

Part of this is because Martin has a Chaplinesque intuition for signs and body language. When you look at his paintings, you can feel meaning in the pit of your stomach even when your intellect can't get wrapped around it. "I did a series of mummies," Martin told me. "I got to thinking about how Egyptians tried to preserve the bodies of the deceased. They eviscerated them, stuffed them with straw, did all kinds of things, then buried them in tombs. Were they creating art? Were they creating immortality? No. They were creating mummies. That's what happens in the art world sometimes. It has the bones but it doesn't have the soul. Museums are full of mummies."

Martin's work transmits an X-ray view of the forms and workings of this world - not necessarily the bones and muscles, but the soul. That ability to see and experience on an extraordinary level, without prejudice - whether it's the sagging curves of a hag or the silken smile of Mona Lisa, the pure pleasure of making art or the shock of a friend's murder - is the thing that defines an artist. Martin has it in spades. Whatever he has relinquished in worldly success seems trivial compared to that unrestrained vision.

Sheila Farr is arts critic for The Seattle Times, a poet and the author of books on artists Fay Jones and Leo Kenney. Paintings were photographed by Spike Mafford.