Work
Knox Martin is best known for his repertory of signs and symbols that allude to nature and, in particular, to the female form. Flatly and freely painted in brilliant colors, his works have often been executed on a grand scale, as in the outdoor wall painting, Woman with bicycle, at West Houston and MacDougal Streets in Manhattan. He mostly creates painting, sculpture and wall paintings using media such as acrylic, collage, fresco, ink drawing (Pen and Ink), Mixed-Media/Multi-Media and oil.
One of his wall paintings in New York City is the twelve-story mural Venus. Painted in 1970, Venus is located on the south side of Bayview Correctional Facility at 19th Street and the West Side Highway.
"Traditionally the goddess of love and fertility, Venus represents woman, erotic and supple, but it also conveys Knox Martin's love affair with New York. Venus is his love poem to the city where he has always lived, a place that is part of his being. The feminine, curvilinear shapes of the image are in direct contrast with the straight forms that intersect the composition. The overwhelming size of this enormous mural only intensifies the experience of female shapes, the linear aspects of the painted composition, and of the surrounding architecture. In an era when art was reaching out to the masses with pop culture, this huge mural was Knox Martin's way of touching a public that would never venture into an art gallery."
(As of 2010, Venus remains largely hidden by an adjacent building).
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Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Auld Nature swears, the lovely Dears
Her noblest work she classes, O:
Her prentice han’ she try’d on man,
An’ then she made the lasses, O.”
—Robert Burns (1759–1796)
“... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)