Roger Martin, 1966 Woodcut "Fleet" Modernist Print

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Description

Genre: Modern
Subject: Landscape
Medium: Print, Woodcut
Surface: Paper
Dimensions w/Frame: 31" x 15 1/2"

Roger was born in the … Read more Genre: Modern
Subject: Landscape
Medium: Print, Woodcut
Surface: Paper
Dimensions w/Frame: 31" x 15 1/2"

Roger was born in the Addison Gilbert Hospital in Gloucester, MA, the son of Capt. Roger Martin and Ellie Emilia Oker, in 1925. His father was born in Rockport, of Portuguese heritage, and his mother was born in Finland. He graduated from Rockport Highschool in 1942. While in high school Roger prepared lobsters for tourists at the Roy Moore Lobster Company on Bearskin Neck and sang and played harmonica with Tony Torissi’s hillbilly band.

Roger enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1942 and mustered out in 1946, ending his military career as a member of the USCG canine corps only two weeks from going to the Pacific with a Marine detachment. After having lived on both coasts (Manhattan and Los Angeles) he returned to his home town from the West Coast, vowing to never leave again, and he hasn’t. When he returned to Cape Ann he entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where he majored in book design and illustration, graduating with honors.
He illustrated a number of textbooks for D.C. Heath, Beacon Press, and other Boston publishers, as well as provided illustrations for the New York Sunday Times, the New Yorker magazine, the Atlantic Monthly magazine, and a book for the United Church of Christ.

Roger also designed, carved and gold-leafed pipe shades for a number of C. B. Fisk pipe organs, builders of tracker action pipe organs, including those at Harvard and Stanford Universities.

He began his teaching career in Rockport, teaching elementary grade art, following that with four years teaching at the New England School of Art in Boston. Roger became a founding faculty member of the Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA, where he taught for twenty years, retiring to make paintings. He was also elected Rockport’s Poet Laureate in the 1990s and in addition wrote and published three books about Rockport.

Roger Martin has exhibited his work throughout New England and beyond. He has shown his work in Portland, ME; New York City; Andover’s Addison Gallery; the Boston ICA; galleries on Newbury Street in Boston; the Rockport Art Association; the Cape Ann Historical Museum (where he is part of the permanent collection); and many others. His work is represented in many private collections, including those of John Updike, Bernard and Ninon Chaet, and Ralph Coburn. See less