By Sarah McMillin, Assistant Living & Arts Editor
The Blough-Weis library is now featuring lifelike portraits of celebrities that were created by Susquehanna professor Jeff Martin.
An opening reception was held on Sept. 12 to celebrate the opening display, where Martin’s new works are the first collection he’s displayed in the library this century.
Martin is an international portrait winner and began teaching art classes at Susquehanna in the late 1980s, where at the time he put together a few collections for the library to display.
Martin usually works paint ing commissioned portraits. He has done portraits for judges, doctors and members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. The paintings on display in the Blough Weis Library, however, are the scenes he paints in between commissions.
“These are fun pictures,” Martin said. “When I paint something like this, I just have to satisfy myself.”
Included in the collection, is one of his most successful works “Black Man on Couch,” which won an international portrait contest sponsored by Artists Magazine.
The collection also features several of his “big head” portraits, featuring celebrities such as Peter Dinklage.
He said he has a lot of fun during the process of creating these types of paintings. “They may not look like fun since there’s so much detail, but I really enjoy these kinds of pictures,” Martin said.
Many of the portraits featured in the library are oil paints on canvas, but Martin is also experienced in pastels. In the 1990s, he was named the 89th master “pastelist” in the world.
Martin’s love of art began when he enrolled at Susquehanna in the early 1970s. He studied English education but found a love for painting when he took his first art class back in 1972.
When he finished his first painting for the class, he realized he truly loved it. “This is my special thing,” he said when recounting the start of his painting career.
“While other people were out partying on weekends, I very often would stay in my dorm room and paint,” he said.
Martin began by painting album covers and selling them for profit to other students.
Upon graduating from Susquehanna with his bachelor of arts in English education, Martin decided to pursue painting as a career. He moved to New York City and studied with the art students league of New York where he focused in on portrait painting.
“Everything I paint, is a portrait,” he said. “If it’s a house, it’s a portrait of a house. If it’s cows laying in a field, it’s a portrait of cows.”
For him, portraits brought a sense of peacefulness and calmness to a painting. “[It is] as if everybody is standing still,” Martin said.
“I strive to show the temperature, the time of day, and the very essence of the person or the place I am painting by the way I juxtapose warm and cool colors, and hard and soft and lost and found edges,” Martin explains on his website.
“I strive for a timeless quality in my subject matter so that the scene could be a moment captured from the 19th, 20th or 21st century.”
Martin then decided to further his artist’s education at the Pennsylvania State University, where he earned his master’s degree in painting and drawing. He then began teaching art classes at Susquehanna. He now teaches film classes.
Besides teaching classes at Susquehanna and painting com missioned portraits, Martin also teaches art workshops around the central Pennsylvania area.
Martin’s exhibit will be on display at the Blough-Weis library until Oct. 5.