Mare Martin

Mare Martin, “Fire Escape (Persimmon)”, 2016, Etching with Watercolor, 25.4 x 20.3 cm, Private Collection

Born in southwestern Louisiana, Mare Martin is an artist of Cajun descent who spent her formative years on a family farm in Opelousas, a small city in the St. Landry Parish. An integration of life on the land and her artistic practice, Martin’s richly textured work depicts the junction of nature, human spirit and the cosmos.

One of seven family members involved in every aspect of farming, Mare Martin is a gardener as well as an artist; her experiences with gardens in Spain and the southern areas of the United States are interwoven throughout her work. The last two decades of Martin’s work have been heavily influenced by German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s first major scientific work, the 1790 botanical treatise “Metamorphosis of Plants”. She was also inspired by Johann von Goethe’s methodology that encouraged a deepened awareness of form through the reinforcement of sense memory and imagination.

In her process, Martin works as closely to the source as possible. The actual plant with a name is the core idea which expands through multiple media including linen canvases, oil paintings, drawings, and ink transfers. She has more recently embraced more modern methods through technology and projections. Martin’s most recent solo exhibition, “Beyond the Botanical” was held in September of 2025 at the Hilliard Art Museum in Lafayette. The show revolved around five themes: Gardens, Landscapes and Sky-scapes, Elements, Realms, and Forces.

“It took years of drawing to realize that I wasn’t just observing. I was collaborating. Before that, I painted landscapes and general scenes. But when I began to draw individual plants over and over again, in different seasons and different stages, it brought me a unique understanding. It’s a collaboration, which means my ego as an artist has to step aside. I feel more, and then the work is more pure, closer to the truth.”

—Mare Martin, November 19, 2025, Studio Session at the Hilliard Art Museum of the University of Louisiana,Lafayette

Notes: The Director and Senior Researcher of The Nature Institute, Craig Holdrege, has written an excellent article on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s approach to science which includes the essential features of Goethe’s methodology and insight. The article “Doing Goethean Science” can be found at: https://www.natureinstitute.org/article/craig-holdrege/doing-goethean-science

An extended interview/studio session with Mare Martin was held at the Hilliard Art Museum of the University of Louisiana. This interview, entitled “Mare Martin on Drawing, Meditation, and the Intelligence of Nature”, is locate on the museums’s site: https://hilliardartmuseum.org/stories/mare-martin-on-drawing-meditation-and-the-intelligence-of-nature/

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Wandrers Nachtlied”

Photographers Unknown, Fleeting Episodes

“As we walk through life, fleeting emotional episodes may keep on twinkling, curl up in the hive of our recollection and enrich our imagination. In the same vein, aesthetic allurement and poetic gracefulness may possess us, besiege our mind, light up our thinking and shape our future. ( “Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh”)”

—-Erik Pevemagle

“Wandrers Nachtlied (Wanderer’s Nightsong)” is the title of two famous poems written by German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

The manuscript of the first, “Der du von dem Himmel bist”, was among Goethe’s letters sent in February of 1776 to his friend Charlotte von Stein. The second poem, “Uber allen Gipfein”, is often considered the most perfect lyric in the German language. It is believed, according to a letter sent to Charlotte von Stein, that Goeth wrote it on the evening of September 6th in 1780, while spending the night in a gamekeeper lodge at the top of Kickelhahn Mountain on the edge of the Central Thuringian Forest.

German poet and translator Karl Ludwig von Knebel, a friend of Wolfgang von Goethe, mentions the “Uber allen Gipfein” manuscript in his diary; and the manuscript was documented by other friends, Johann Herder and Louise von Göchhausen. This manuscript was later published in 1800 and 1803, without authorization, by writer and publicist August von Hennings. An English version of “Uber allen Gipfein” appeared in London’s “Monthly Magazine” in February of 1801.

These two poems were first published together in Goethe’s 1815 “Works Volume One” under the headings “Wandrers Nachtlied” and “Ein Gleiches (Another One)”. Both works were set to classical music by Austrian composer Franz Schubert: the first “D 224”, published in 1821 as “Op. 4 No. 1” and the second “D 768”, published in 1822 as “Op. 96 No. 3”.

“Über allen Gipfein ist Ruh, In allen Wipfein Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch.”

-Wolfgang von Goethe

“O’er all the hilltops is quiet now, in all the treetops hearest thou hardly a breath; The birds are asleep in the trees. Wait, soon like these thou too shalt rest.”

– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Two Views

Wonder in Two Views

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe