Joseph De Martini, one of a group of artists who embraced the new abstract painting of the 1940s and 1950s in New York’s artworld, brought to the summer community of Monhegan Island, Maine, a fresh response to the aura of the sea. While earlier artists painted what they saw, De Martini painted the impact of nature playing on his senses. Born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1894, De Martini’s presence in New York was strongly felt during the 1930s in the New Deal art movement and a decade later with somber abstractions of the visual world. Art critics observed his rugged seascapes: "With painting-shadowed sides and strong, dark lines where rocks meet the water, he can create a pattern of great strength without declaring for abstraction and without losing the romance of place which gives his paintings their greatest appeal." (Art Digest, 1942) Before migrating to the North, De Martini spent a year at University of Georgia as “Artist-in-Residence,” building an alliance with noted champion of modernism, Lamar Dodd, who founded the Art Department at the school. It was likely that Dodd was charmed into discovering Monhegan through De Martini’s influence as he, also, began to view the rocks and surf with an expressionistic canvas. The Monhegan summer art colony attracted De Martini’s friends from New York who collected mutual feelings for the sea while painting assiduously – with a strength of emotion – the ravaged shipwrecks, storms at sea, foam- thrashing shoreline, and dramatic dawns and sunsets. A taste for abstraction was shared by all, while De Martini alternated his passionate responses with quiet scenes from his fishhouse studio. Self reflection occupied his visual interest over the entirety of his life ranging from a youthful 1930 image to that of his latter years in his striped bathrobe, standing stalwartly like a classical column. Three themes in De Martini’s art – the sea, the studio, the man – describe the 50 paintings exhibited here that profoundly define the person.   Dr. Valerie Livingston   The Wreck at Squeaker Cove, Joseph De Martini, oil on canvas, 1950, 30 x 40" Collection of Geoffrey H. Robinson, River Gallery Fine Art