Kingfisher
 a Journal of Northwest Art and Literature  

Summer 2002
Volume One, Number Three
 Copyright 2002 Kingfisher Press

page three

Featured Painter James Martin (see front page)

The two paintings shown in this issue are from his Lone Ranger Series.

Lion Tamer, 1998

We are pleased to feature two paintings by Jim Martin, a classmate of the Editor's at the UW, when we were both writers. I published fiction by him in 1952, before he turned his talents deservingly to painting. Most of his life as a painter was spent in self-styled reclusion. He painted what he felt like, when he felt like it, and most of his work contains cartoonish elements. Either you like him or you don't. I do. He is a funny man, with a whimsical sense of humor that both mocks and enhances art and the art object. Perhaps this is how it should be.

Sheila Farr induced UW Press into publishing a large collection of his work in 2001. MONA is listed as co-publisher. The book is entitled, Art Rustler at the Rivoli. To the uninitiated, The Rivoli was a burlesque house on Seattle's First Avenue, very near to Skid Road. It is a little unfair to brand him in this way, with an episode out of the long-ago past, much as it was to link Richard Gilkey with bad days at The Blue Moon Tavern, but so it goes. 

Nice book, go buy it. In his "Afterword" to the book, Martin states: "At some point in my efforts to learn to paint, I had to finally decide not to be intimidated by what has gone on before--to learn from the influences of others and then find my own voice. . . . The flavor and aroma of art emerges with the degree of the maker's genius." [The boldface is his.]

I say, "Good job, Jim. And, I notice, you still have a way with words."

"Anamorphosis," 1944, by Margaret Tompkins.

Margaret Tompkins, 85, died of heart failure in April. She was an artist of considerable dedication and talent.  She fought off the label of "Northwest artist" and went her own way, painting beautiful abstract expressionistic landscapes.  She was the wife of the painter and sculptor James Fitzgerald. For many years she lived on Lopez Island.

Fellow painter Bill Cummings thought she didn't get the attention she deserved. Painting watercolors in California, she moved to Washington state and soon its landscapes began to manifest themselves in her paintings. She abhorred the mystic painters and thought them "vaporous" and pretentious. Yet they contained a mysticism of their own. Widowed in 1973, she disdained followers and sycophants, living alone in a house hand-built on the edge of a cliff.

MONA curator Barbara James said she has been long interested in exhibiting a retrospective of Tompkins' work. Nice, it would have been, if it had taken place during the artist's eight and one-half decades alive.

John Hauberg--long time benefactor and patron of the arts, died on April 5,2002, after a three-week stay in the hospital fighting a bacterial infection. He was  85. A graduate of Princeton and the University of Washington, he took his place in the Denkmann/Weyerhauser timber industry, and was specially concerned with growing Douglas fir trees in the fecund lowlands of Puget Sound in the Stanwood/Arlington area. He started Pilchuck Tree Farm.

But he was better known as a patron of the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Art Museum, Museum of Northwest Art (in LaConner), where he promised to leave a number of important paintings by (among others) Mark Tobey and Morris Graves (see Kingfisher Journal, Volume 1, Number 2). He donated generously to many social and humanitarian causes, including the UW Medical School's Center on Human Development and Disability.