Bill Martin

Who was Bill Martin?

Bill Martin was a realist, visionary painter from the San Francisco Bay Area. His work was popular in the 1970s.

Martin earned his bachelors and masters in fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. Martin later taught at the Art Institute, as well as the University of California, Berkeley, San Jose State University and College of the Redwoods. He lived in Mendocino, California.

San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker wrote that Martin had "one artistic foot in Surrealism and the other in the tradition of light-soaked 19th century American landscape painting," practicing "a representational style so fastidious that everything he paints takes on a preternatural clarity." He often painted on round or semicircular canvases.

His work has been shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.