Martha Ferris
About the Artist
Martha Ferris grew up on her family farm on the banks of the Big Black River in western Mississippi, and her early work reflects the rich variety and vivid colors of the flowers, trees and abundant wildlife that flourishes in the Big Black River Basin. From the beginning Martha committed herself to a program of continuous experimentation and constant change, a process that took her work from small patches of fabric transformed by traditional techniques, particularly batik, to the large scale splash pools she designed for the Mississippi Museum of Art's public gardens. These splash pools are a complicated work of art and engineering that doubles as a children’s play space.
Martha has continued to experiment across a growing range of media. Her cityscapes combine her love of exacting geometry with the warm and vivid colors that characterize much of her work. Many of these works were featured in her one-woman show, Foreign and Familiar Places, at Fischer Galleries in 2015, an exhibit that won her the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Visual Arts award in 2016.
In 2017 her family’s farm was sold, an event that spurred her Farm Series, paintings that celebrated the place where she and her siblings grew up and she and her husband lived for 28 years. Those paintings were shown at Fischer Galleries in 2018 in her exhibit, The Farm. She and her husband, award winning writer Kos Kostmayer, moved to Garrison, NY, in 2018, where she began painting landscapes inspired by her new life in the Hudson River Valley. Her richly detailed and highly evocative landscapes move beyond conventional or literal interpretations to reveal the abstract nature of the visible world. Her work is recognizable without being traditional, and her way of fusing architectural exactitude with warm and brilliant colors is both realistic and surprising.
