Martha Kennedy was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. She currently lives & works in Santa Fe, NM, surrounded by sunshine, mountains and desert. She studied art at the Ontario College of Art & Design, University of MN, Minneapolis and Lake Tahoe Community College, but has found that her life's experiences have played an even more important part: Years on the professional mountain bike race circuit, traveling all over the US and Canada, training hard, meeting people - travels to Central & South America - more years as a massage therapist. And most of all, years of simply painting and observing her subjects.
Martha works primarily in oil on panel. The pure colours of oil paint are mixed on her palette and blended on panel. Subsequent layers of glazes bring out the vivid and rich colour of her distinctive landscapes and still lives.
Martha is in the permanent collections of the Halden Art Gallery, Lake Tahoe Community College, the Renown Art Collections, Reno, NV, Northern New Mexico Community College, Belen, NM Maintenance Facility, and numerous private international collections. She also exhibits in Palm Springs, CA, Santa Fe, NM, Scottsdale, AZ, Tulsa, OK, and Knoxville, TN.
Three main factors have influenced the way I compose and paint with oils. My years of physically moving through the landscape on foot and on bike, more years practicing massage therapy and yoga, and then extensive schooling in a variety of Printmaking disciplines.
Movement and speed while passing through the landscape cause me to smooth out details so that forms are abbreviated, and colours separate into large masses. The vast openness and quiet solitude of the Southwest are simplified into the feeling of spare, muscular shapes, and then wrapped in a rich palette of mouth-watering colour.
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