Ellen McCormick Martens: My Odyssey

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Ellen McCormick Martens: My Odyssey

I was one of five children, all girls, and all artists. My mother was an artist, but her mental illness waylaid her development. She always encouraged me to draw and paint, and because she saw my potential as an artist, she gave me lessons with a local artist, and at the local museum.

I got married right after high school, and had three children. When my marriage broke up, I hitchhiked across the country, and settled in Oregon, where I attended Lane Community College as an art major. Then I attended the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon.

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I left school after two years, thinking I had gotten the basics, and fearful that I would not be able to pay back my student loans. I spent a year doing various art projects and working as a pasteup artist.

Then I moved to New York City, where I did some fair amount of work, still finding my voice as a painter, and where I became a typesetter. After that I moved once again, to Houston, Texas. There I began to feel real frustration with typesetting for a living when I wanted so much to paint full time.

I remarried in 1990. We moved to Wisconsin the next year, and I continued to work as a typesetter, until one day I came home frustrated and sad. I wanted to paint. Luckily, my husband is very supportive, and he said if I could work out the budget, I could quit my job and paint full-time. That was the beginning of my professional painting. I found a wonderful fellow painter, Nancy Raufman (see her site via my links), and we painted together frequently.


First Booth	Second Booth

Opening, Frogtown Framing & Gallery	Opening, Fanny Garver Gallery

In order to sell my new works of art, I started entering art fairs, and the very first one we did was in Green Lake, Wisconsin, where we used a rented tent, and homemade pegboard display racks. The other artists had beautiful white pop-up booths, and I was envious. So I bought a booth, and started out on the road. The best part of doing these outdoor festivals was the contact I had with the people who expressed interest in my work, and some even bought paintings! I will always be glad I did art fairs.

Then, Fanny Garver Gallery and Frogtown Framing and Gallery gave me a real break, representing my work when I was unknown.

We moved to the Buffalo, New York, area in 1996, and to the Houston, Texas, area in 2002, and I have a studio at home. I stopped painting when my son Steve died, but I am slowly starting to paint again.


Winning Painting	Ellen receiving award from Don Siuta

On August 16, 2002, I received the 3rd Place Award at the Western New York Artists' Group Regional Exhibition. The juror was Douglas Schultz, Director of the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York.

Last revised: July 17, 2007

URL: http://www.ellenmccormickmartens.com/odyssey.html