Martha Rea Baker has returned from her annual painting retreat at the HCAF in Ingram, TX where she joined sixteen other artists in the beautiful Texas Hill Country. These ten days of uninterrupted studio time are a valuable creative genesis each year for the artist – a time to experiment without distractions. Working a bit smaller this year on 30″ x 30″ canvases, Martha completed the triptych below:  Reflections I, II & III

The Hill Country Arts Foundation presented an exhibit of the seventeen AWOL – Artists Without Limits – painters in the beautiful Duncan-McAshan Gallery with a well-attended opening reception on January 9.Following the retreat this year Martha spent an extra week in Dallas, TX viewing the Jackson Pollock exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art, visiting friends, collectors and various galleries and attending an art exchange party with several acclaimed Dallas artists. The first three weeks of January have provided much inspiration for an exciting 2016.

Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots is the largest survey of the artist’s black paintings ever assembled. It offers critical new scholarship on this understudied yet pivotal period in the artist’s career and provides radical new insights into Pollock’s practice. With more than 70 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, the exhibition first introduces audiences to Pollock’s work via a selection of his classic drip paintings made between 1947 and 1950. These works serve to contextualize the radical departure represented by the black paintings, a series of black enamel paintings that Pollock created between 1951 and 1953. An unprecedented 31 black paintings are included in the DMA presentation. Exhibition works from the height of the artist’s celebrity set against his lesser known paintings offers the opportunity to appreciate Pollock’s broader ambitions as an artist, and to better understand the importance of the “blind spots” in his practice.