Gallery 78’s June exhibition series also includes its popular Artists Choice exhibition featuring hand picked work by a variety of Gallery favourites.
Raymond Martin’s latest exhibition Perspective panoramique features delightful scenes, with nature front and centre. There are cozy and familiar settings – reading by the lake, a bustling market with vendors selling their wares, a gallery opening – as well as novel and reimagined vistas – common murres flying across the great blue sky, a condensed view of the country with the Petitcodiac River on one end and the snow-dusted mountains of Haida Gwaii on the other.
In this exhibition, Raymond brings his classic characters out to play. Birds, cats, cows and foxes are joined by a lynx and peacock, all interacting with their environments and nearby humans.
In this body of work, the specific dimensions of the canvases also play a part. Each 8 x 36 in. forms a narrative which may be read from both right to left, and left to right, and creates an idyllic panoramic view into the created worlds of his brilliant imagination.
June is also Artists Choice month at Gallery 78 featuring selected work by Céline Genest, Susan Paterson, Paul Healey, David McKay, and Joanne Hunt.
About the Artist:
Raymond Martin was born in Lac-à-la-Croix (Lac-St-Jean) in Quebec in 1958 and has lived in Moncton, New Brunswick for more than thirty years. In 1981, he received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Ottawa, and in 1986 obtained a master’s degree in psychology from Moncton University. Gallery 78 has represented Raymond’s work for over 20 years. He shares his time working as a child psychologist and as an artist from his studio at the Aberdeen Cultural Centre in Moncton.
Raymond Martin transposes the beauty and wonder of the world into remarkable paintings of simplified outlines and flattened views that resonate as material analogues for the unconscious, the mythical and the spiritual. Incised lines in thick impasto lead us along circuitous paths and decorative labyrinth patterns into a nonlinear, transpersonal ‘Dream Time’.
Integrating a deep awareness of the psychological power and magic of children’s drawings, his enchanted vision poetically melds the Cartesian split between inner human consciousness and the objective reality of the world outside.
Martin challenges the assumption that we exist as alienated, isolated individuals in a hostile, indifferent environment. His compassionate paintings celebrate our place in the cosmos, the sense of our complete interdependence in the larger scheme of things … For Martin, the way of the world is not based on Darwin’s law of ‘tooth and claw’, but on cooperation in community, on establishing relationships within the single web of life.” (excerpts from the essay “The Enchanted Vision of Raymond Martin” by Terry Graff, January 1994)
Raymond’s paintings are found in important public collections, including the Canada Council Art Bank, Foreign Affairs Canada, the New Brunswick Art Bank, the University of New Brunswick, l’Université de Moncton, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery collection, as well as corporate and private collections.
He has exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions from Newfoundland to British Columbia since 1985.
Enjoy work by all these artists and more on display now at Gallery 78 until June 22.
