Marty in his Studio Very spiritual at his innermost roots, American artist Marty Maehr seeks to represent the ineffable, speaking through the most essential visual elements to allow his audience to feel and meditate. Working with primarily oil on canvas, Maehr employs a thick impasto application of paint, crafting a rich symbolic schema in color and form while often avoiding representation altogether.

In technicolor boldness and clarity, we are transported to where sunlight or stars beam down upon a world teeming with life, an Edenic place of innocence and wonder. Maehr possesses a deep-seated kinship with nature. The energies of plants and animals, along with the elemental forces of light, water and wind, appear to reach out towards a horizon through Maehr’s rich strokes of paint. One may discover vistas of lush valleys and rolling hills flowing under lunar bodies and fiery sunsets. These paintings are not just pretty playthings, but spiritual endeavors. Maehr is deeply involved with philosophy, naming Emerson, Lao Tzu, Nietzche and Plato as influential to his thinking in addition to Biblical and ancient Chinese beliefs. These thinkers stimulate Maehr’s creative mind and through painting he is able to let his thoughts become a reality, pouring out from mind to matter. "I have the utmost respect for the creative process and how it is able to work its way through all of us in a transcendent/transformative sort of way." He significantly adjusts his palette for each piece. Most of Maehr’s works achieve a stained glass intensity of color, as brilliant crimson and vivid springtime green flood through a framework of heavy black lines. "The color spectrum has become a language for me," Maehr explains. "The color wheel, to me, mirrors the human soul."