“Daisy” by Martha Burkert
There is something refreshing and different about Martha Burkert’s work. Brilliant colors, happy composition and style. Very nice! Check out Martha’s website.
Here’s a blip about Martha from the Maine Home + Design website:
MARTHA BURKERTMartha Burkert grew up in Texas and received a BA in English from Tulane University in New Orleans. She took studio classes at the Maine College of Art in Portland and the University of North Texas in Denton. Burkert was invited to an artists’ retreat at Maine Audubon’s Borestone Mountain Sanctuary in Monson in 2008, and she has exhibited widely at galleries in Maine and Texas. The artist now divides her time between Dallas and Yarmouth. She is represented by the Elizabeth Moss Galleries in Falmouth.Martha Burkert was compelled by the beauty of Maine to learn the technical skills needed to capture it. While she has been painting only since 2000, the artist already had a keen sense of design—she was a location scout and photo stylist for Thos. Moser and for home-furnishing catalogs. Burkert’s mature work shows the influence of some of Maine’s best colorists, including Fairfield Porter (1907–1975) and Alfred Cheney Chadbourn (1921–1998), who worked representationally but leaned toward abstraction.Burkert often creates small paintings and oil sketches on-site. Additionally, she takes photographs in black-and-white instead of color because the chromatic range is too limited for her needs. Yet all these direct responses to nature only serve as references and jumping-off points. In the larger paintings she executes in her studio, paint application, color resonance, temperatures, and commanding shapes become the artist’s focal points. “The bigger the canvas, the more I push color and form in a more exaggerated direction,” Burkert says.
Complex landscapes are often arranged into a repoussoir of more detailed flowers or trees in the immediate foreground, with expansive planes of loosely painted color in the background suggestive of the sea, clouds, or other major landscape formations. In Queen Anne’s Lace, Burkert evinces the liberties she takes with naturalistic representation, and water and sky have turned into bands of yellow and pink. The artist often experiments with color combinations until they feel right to her—an emotional and intuitive process that the artist confesses she doesn’t fully understand.
Growing up surrounded by the landscapes of Texas, Burkert appreciates the beauty of vast unfilled spaces. Maine’s landscapes, on the other hand, are more visually complex and seasonally changeable. The artist therefore likes to distill her paintings to their basic elements. “There is a beauty in simple things,” she says.
Catch you back here tomorrow!
ARTFOODHOME.COM 
Thank you, Barbara for your kind words! Let me know when you are in the Portland area and if I’m at our cottage on Cousin’s Island, please stop by for a studio visit! Also–I bought those green wall lamps from Urban Outfitters a week ago!! Love them :)
Martha Burkert
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Next time we head to Maine, I will contact you to see if you’ll be at your cottage! We would love to stop by your Studio!
What good taste you have, hee hee, those green wall lamps are so cool! Glad to hear you love them! Woohoo!
Have a great week!
barbara
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