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Eugene J. Martin, 1988

E.J. Martin, 1993

E.J. Martin's hand at work, 2014

 About

Eugene J. Martin (b. Washington, D.C., July 24, 1938 - d. Lafayette, Louisiana, January 1, 2005) was an African American visual artist.

Eugene Martin's art is best known for his imaginative, complex mixed media synchronic and heterochronic collages on paper, his often gently humorous pencil and pen and ink drawings, and his paintings on paper and canvas that may incorporate whimsical allusions to animal, machine and structural imagery among areas of "pure", constructed, biomorphic, or disciplined lyrical abstraction. Martin called many of his works straddling both abstraction and representation "satirical abstracts”. He did not create sculptures.

After attending the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C. from 1960–1963, Eugene James Martin became a professional fine arts painter, considering artistic integrity his only guide. He did not adhere to any particular school or art movement, remaining an individualist throughout his life. His art defies categorization.

While spending most of his life in Washington D.C., Martin briefly lived in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, from 1990–1994, returned to Washington D.C., and in 1996 moved to Lafayette, Louisiana with his wife, Suzanne Fredericq, a biologist, whom he married in 1988 and who manages the Eugene James Martin Estate. In December 2001 he suffered simultaneously a brain hemorrhage and stroke while in Belgium. After undergoing physical therapy in Lafayette, he resumed painting and continued creating art until his death.