About the Artist

Bob Marty has created an extensive "image bank" from a variety of different sources: original drawings and paintings, photographs, archival materials, and clippings from magazines. He combines and transforms these images through digital compositing. The newly assembled images are then painted on, drawn over, sculpted, re-photographed and otherwise "touched" to extract fresh metaphors, myths and narratives.

The recent grid-based works such as "I Can't Sleep" reflects his successful 20-year career as a television producer and director for PBS, NBC, BBC and others. Marty’s technique parallels the multiple angles, framing, focus and scale which form the tableau of a television control room. Indeed, his visual language represents an “editing” process: selecting and discarding, obscuring and emphasizing, disguising and revealing, the kinetic and temporal nature of television in two dimensions.

These curiously cryptic mixed-media works are based on personal myths and popular cultural narratives. The paintings explore the collision of vanity and humility, personal and communal, the real and the illusionary, mass media and fine art, literal and symbolic, and chance and deliberation.

As narrative puzzles, these paintings insist on conscious interpretation. Marty mixes metaphors and asks the viewer to connect the ideas and visual clues to synthesize an underlying theme and meaning. The paintings suggest more than a literal reading of the juxtaposed visual elements.

Marty has said, "I believe that there is more in the universe than what we see with our eyes. Dreams, intuition, wisdom, and faith go beyond direct perception and suggest a larger truth about the world and the human condition."