Martha Horvay-Painter

Produced by Joel Geyer, Nebraska ETV Cultural Affairs
Adapted from the documentary Is It Art?

George Neubert is the director of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has selected painter Martha Horvay for an upcoming exhibit.
[Neubert:] "Nothing more exciting to a museum director or curator than to go to an artist's studio. You may have read her biography. You may know the work she's developed. You think you understand it, that you have a knowledge and awareness of the work. You walk into that studio and encounter new work and you're absolutely bowled over because you see something you hadn't seen before."
[Martha Horvay talking with Neubert:] "I go from my sketch book to the blackboard to the mechanical drawing. This gives me an idea at least of what it's going to look like in that scale.
Martha Horvay teaches painting and art history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
[Martha:] "And it also gives me a chance to try out things that I might put in the painting."
[George:] "There's no question that she is extremely knowledgeable about her place, about what has gone before, art historically. Much of that sophistication and knowledge is reflected in her work. But added to that is this wonderful personal nostalgic experience of the '50s and the '40s -- of her own life, of her own upbringing. She combines it in this extraordinarily unique, somewhat strange, but beautiful paintings."
[George with Martha:] "These are black-eyed peas, aren't they?"
[Martha:] "Right."
[George:] "you know, there're a lot of references to the south there. Were you living in the south?"
[Martha:] "I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky."
[George:] "Okay."
[Martha:] "And, in fact, the title of that, which is "resolutions" has to do with making new year's resolutions black-eyed peas. eating black-eyed peas."
[Martha:] "I was the oldest of five children and I knew I had to support myself. I thought, you know, I'd better be practical or I'd be on the unemployment line. So I knew I wanted to be in art, and that meant my choices were industrial design, advertising, interior design. By the time I graduated with an industrial design major I realized that was not the right major for me.
Martha became a painter.
[Martha:] "I'm really interested in showing things that look like they're the remnants of past civilizations that have been abandoned and have been worn down by the ravages of time and the elements. I'm not referring to any particular event in history but I do want you to think about past civilizations and what remains of them how we perceive them when we look at ancient pieces of architecture. Who might have lived there and what happened to the people that lived there."
[Martha:] "I get a lot of things at the Party Favor Department of K-mart where you can buy something like a little -- a little something to give to 8 kids at a birthday party. Here's some kind of poster in Russian. Pasta Del Capitano, Italian Toothpaste. (laughs) I read a quote recently -- and I can't really quote the author of it -- that said, artists have the ability to make ordinary things look strange, and strange things look ordinary. And I think I'm of the variety that tries to make ordinary things look strange. Sliced beets. Those found their way into a painting.
Martha's world is populated by everyday objects that seem to take on an alien quality. One way Martha achieves this effect is axonometric perspective.
[Martha:] "These lines stay parallel indefinitely to each, to one another. No matter how far back they go they're still parallel, and what that does is it gives it a kind of awkward quality that's not true to life. It can look very wacky and distorted, but I really choose it for these distortions and it has a kind of childlike quality at the same time.
Adding a feeling of depth and age to her paintings is her use of a heavily layered mixture of age-old fresco-like plaster and modern acrylic polymer. After carefully establishing the outlines of her object she literally buries it in a heavy paste with a strong color overlay. Then, like an archeologist brushing away the accumulations of time she sands her way back to her design. As she paints and sands, sands and paints you begin to peer back through as many as a dozen layers of paint to an isolated image that seems to evoke new and old at the same time.
[Martha:] "When I was very small and was growing up in Erie, Pennsylvania we lived near the Bucyrus Erie. I don't know if you'd call it a factory but we drove by these acres and acres of steam shovels and road graters that were just -- those made a very strong impression on me when I was five years old."
[Off-camera question:] "Do you agree with that quote?"
[Martha:] "Yes, (laughs) I do. I think that a lot of what I'm doing now if I can wax philosophical is that I'm coming to grips with passing my 40th birthday. I'm thinking about time a lot and, you know, what happens when you're not here anymore?"
[George:] "There seems to be extreme need now in America to collect our own past. In many cases our own age our own generation of 30's and 40's are collecting these things as nostalgic. Somehow Martha takes that another step further and turning that into a high form of perception and you have that same kind of emotional response that I think you do to a worn object that somehow came from your childhood and yet it's abstract and it's communicated in visual language and goes beyond that so it's not specific, but universal and that's when it becomes great art."