Sue Martin, left, shows her accordion book of photo references created while in Orvieto, Italy

Sue Martin spent nearly four weeks in Italy in July in a graduate course offered by the Institute of Christian Studies in Toronto. The course included a seminar on the intersection of philosophy, religion, and art, plus a visual art workshop.

“My prior art history and philosophy education was minimal, so the seminar was both fascinating and challenging,” Martin says. “Lots of reading – from Plato to Martin Luther to Nicholas Wolterstorff — on beauty, icons, meaning, imagination, transcendence, etc. It whetted my appetite for more study of philosophy and art history.”

Rome and Assisi and two days in Florence. The course was based in Orvieto, an old hill town north of Rome  about a mile long and wide, and included excursions to Rome, Assissi and Florence. The group of 18 stayed in a convent dating to the 16th century. During a record-breaking heatwave, the facilities had minimal air-conditioning. Mornings were spent at a two-hour seminar, followed by a leisurely lunch in a restaurant on the other side of town. The artists in the group would then walk another half-mile to the art studio. “Thankfully, it was better air conditioned,” Martin says. “The heat and humidity were oppressive for this desert woman, but the whole experience was nevertheless exhilarating! When we were not in class or the studio, we were visiting historic sites, cathedrals, and museums around town, attending music performances, eating gelato, having drinks and dinner at 9 p.m., and then remembering, ‘Oh, heck, I have reading to do for tomorrow’s class!'”

For the art workshop, Martin created daily watercolor sketches in an accordion book using photo references. “It was too blasted hot to paint en plein air,” she says. “That was a fun way to capture memories and a good warm up for my main project —  a series of paintings (prototypes for my current new series) that I called “layers of faith.” It started with visits to churches in Orvieto that are built on top of churches, built on top of other churches, that were built over Etruscan ruins. Each era has its own decorative motifs, and left behind architectural ruins, frescoes, and mosaics in varied states of disrepair. I began to see the motifs as legacies from one generation to the next and the damaged frescoes as metaphor for the fraying fabric of faith traditions today. As I worked, it also occurred to me that the damaged frescoes could also be a metaphor for the damage religion has caused over the centuries.”

For her pieces, Martin stenciled designs representing Greek, Roman, Etruscan, and Renaissance cultures using gouache, and then painted images over that base using watercolor, gouache, and a little acrylic. Back in her Salt Lake studio, she continued the series using oil and cold wax.

Work in progress from the “Layers of Faith” series

You can get a peek at these works, plus some plein air landscapes from less oppressively hot parts of the summer, at Martin’s studio during the Bogue Open Studios, Saturday, Sep. 16. You can find more of the artist’s work at suemartinfineart.com.

Autumn Salon

Inspired by the French Salon d’Automne, a less formal alternative to the official Salon in the Spring, our Autumn Salon series highlights work Utah artist created during the summer months and informed by travel.