Spectral Images: The New Work of Bob Marty
   by Phoebe Hoban

The Portraiture of Bob Marty
   by Jon Waldo

Complex Collisions
   by Peter Drake

Spectral Images: The New Work of Bob Marty
by Phoebe Hoban

Call them spiritual snapshots-haunting portraits that achieve a technological and psychological epiphany. Working in the tradition of Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman and even the pop-portraitmeister himself, Andy Warhol, Bob Marty has developed a multi-media technique to, as he puts it, "capture the souls" of his subjects, most of them members of his inner circle-friends, lovers, colleagues, even his therapist. Using a layered process of digital photography, drawing and painting, Marty has created a series of perspicacious portraits that seem to be as much about his subjects' inner aspects as outer ones.

Marty, who started out as a sculptor and supported himself by building Sesame Street puppets during the 1980's, went on to develop a multi-million dollar television production company, MPI. Among his company's specials were a number of PBS profiles of people as varied as Bobby Darin, Victor Borge, Martha Stewart, Danny Kaye, and Andrew Weil, MD. Marty says that his current work employs all the skills he learned over the last 25 years- from carpentry to drawing to editing to interviewing. "In a way, I approach these portraits the way I would an interview. Because I've established an intimacy, I can create a dialogue with people in which they reveal themselves."

While his candy-colored palette evokes the technicolor tints of Warhol's celebrity silk-screens, Marty's hues hover somewhere between psychedelic posters and stained-glass windows, making his work extremely accessible-even commercial-and at the same time profoundly numinous. Unlike Close's huge-scale portraits, which evoke their subjects by meticulously building, bit by bit, a larger-than-life study of personal features, Marty allows his process to enshroud his subjects in a self-generating aura, which while obscuring individual features, seems to illuminate an inner essence.

Take, for instance, his portrait of Marble Collegiate Church member Anne Buford, whose generosity of spirit seems to effervesce in a molten orange glow, with the words "God Bless" floating serenely in the background. Or his image of fellow-artist Peter Drake, enigmatically peering out of a fissure in the Rosetta Stone. His portrait of artist Jon Waldo has mysterious lightning-bolts shooting out of his eyes, which, Marty says, emerged on their own during the technical process. "What better way to express Jon's creativity," Marty marvels, looking at the luminous zig-zags. When Marty took a picture of me, the resulting image was a ghostly, faceless blur of a figure. The artist points out that although I am apparently "enveloped in wistfulness" I seem at the same time to be observing with a just-visible penetrating eye. "I try to create profiles that both celebrate people and give information about them, a visual representation that is more than just physical," he says. "At the same time, there is an element of chance. Things happen while I'm not aware of them. Just the way this is an accidental, found process that I discovered when I was taking a snapshot of a friend and it was set at the wrong speed and it blurred and suddenly there was more in the picture rather than less. Not to sound pretentious, but it's like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. The more you look at it, the more you can't see it. It's almost as if this magic happens when the moment is captured, but if I had tried to make it happen, it wouldn't have. It's a matter of putting yourself in the moment and trusting."

The Portraiture of Bob Marty
by Jon Waldo

"He whose face gives no light shall never become a star." -William Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Inherent in the work of Bob Marty is his belief in the soul of man. People sit for him; friends, his minister, his shrink, and his lawyer are revealed in light. His insistence on the spirit is reinforced in each picture. Bob's recent work consists of single or grouped figures placed "up front" in the foreground of the picture. What he gives us is more than a simple recording of the subject but a figure fragmented by light-moving, not in a futurist's sense of speed, but in energy or atmosphere. These are pictures of emanations showing us what is hidden inside and outside the physical possibilities of our bodies. Bob finds transformation in the human form.

Bob's work starts with a manipulated digital image that is often mounted on a wooden support and painted or drawn upon. The digital "underpainting" is anything but a straight photo or an end in itself. Bob uses this compressed information field as a base for a tactile "natural" painting. His digital work has a warm analogue resonance that is further enhanced by his employment of traditional painting techniques, like glazing and drawing. As an experienced television producer he naturally uses the screen as a part of his picture-making.

Bob's work as an interviewer, producer and director is certainly the stuff of star-making. Like an alchemist, he is now using these skills to make pictures that bring the human spirit to light.

Complex Collisions
by Peter Drake

So much of the history of Twentieth Century art is the history of reduction that it's easy to forget that complexity is the hallmark of everything that came before it. Bob Marty's work starts with the assumption that Twenty-First Century visual culture is a culture of complex collision. This is the collision of technology and the hand, art history and mass media, the intuitive and the cognitive. But while the Post Modern proposition insists that a layered intersection of disparate ideas leads to neutralization, Marty's work suggests that complex synthesis leads to complex meaning. But this signification is the hard-won kind, the kind that stands in recognition of the uncertainty that characterizes our time.

The real brilliance of Bob Marty's work lies in the fact that every move both establishes meaning and questions its source simultaneously. When Marty uses one of his own paintings as a digital backdrop for a photograph, he validates the act of painting while obscuring its origin. When he moves his camera during the release of the shutter, an analog gesture mimics a digital effect. When he paints back into this complex synthesis, he re-establishes his commitment to the history of the hand. This work takes the deeply personal and filters it through a technological prescription in an effort to find its most universal component. It then takes the analytical and re-personalizes it through the application of gestural paint reintroducing the expressive while confounding our expectations of what is real and what is illusionist.

Bob Marty has created a complex system where information is given, manipulated, distorted, lost, recouped and obscured again in an effort to create an arena where the viewer can immerse themselves in a constantly percolating swirl of ideas and emotions which present themselves and evaporate just before a moment of complete recognition. Ultimately the viewer is asked a series of very demanding questions. When does the loss of information create more meaning? How much information do we need to create meaning? What is real and what is illusionist?

This work creates a Rorschach-like environment where interpretation is catalyzed but not confined. Thick blond hair crackles with fluorescent energy. Wire-framed glasses morph into an indecipherable neon calligraphy. The vertical slide of a figure suggests both an ascension and Munch's Scream. Superimposition implies a doppelganger world of benign and menacing spirits.This is a Broadway Boogie Woogie gone bad, a pre-Disney Forty Second Street with all of its passions and perversions intact. Color slides from the real into the unreal and back into a meta-real world where the familiar becomes unfamiliar. Flesh tones turn aquamarine or magenta suggesting that the inner lives of the sitters can't be taken for granted.

All great art both builds on tradition and embraces radical change. Bob Marty's work recognizes the history of portrait photography and gestural painting while immersing itself in emerging technology in a way that makes it utterly new. In an era of the constant resuscitation of old ideas, it is astonishing to say that this work could only exist in our own time.