Passport to Texas

Painting: An evening walk along looking at the Resaca off Retama St by St. Joe. Artist: Jesus Toro Martinez

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This is Passport to Texas

When San Antonio artist, and native Texan, Jesus “Toro” Martinez, isn’t inside his studio at Lone Star Art Space, he’s nearby, collecting materials for his work.

This morning I got some trash along the San Pedro Creek, here outside my studio. This is a piece of aluminum can; I’m cutting it into pieces, so I can put it into my grinder and start making different levels of pigment.

He creates pigments from trash that washes up along the creek bed. When we met, he was working on a series called Creeks and Rivers.

Our Texas lands are so beautiful and vast, and we need to figure out how to protect them. This is more or less a way of me trying to advocate for that by showing it in my work, and then showing them the process of where it came from.

For years Toro has turned non-traditional elements into pigments for his abstract paintings

And now, I’ve created more of a stronger cause, such as: let’s clean our rivers and creeks. This is stuff that I’m finding here. And going down to the gulf—these will end up down there. And since I love fish, I don’t like to see my fish to start tasting like plastic.

Toro’s work is available in Texas through Lone Star Art Space and Dock Space Gallery in San Antonio.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2019 at 12:00 am and is filed under Art of Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.