10/01/2020
“Steamboat Slough Basile Bridge” by an oil painting that’s currently on view by appointment. For two decades Martin Machado has had his feet in two very different endeavors, that of the fine art world and of the maritime industry. His labor on the water has taken him around the globe on international containerships, commercial fishing vessels, and sailing boats. The ports and people he has worked alongside have become intertwined with the layers of his art, a visual story-telling based on his own experience but reaching back into the history of maritime exploration, colonialism, and ultimately to the core of our human relationship with the sea.
This recent body of work stems from a two hundred mile voyage he made last spring, solo sailing a twenty-six foot sailboat from San Francisco up through the delta to Sacramento and back. Along the way, Machado created the works for the exhibition, painting in the cabin and cockpit of the small boat while at anchor. Unfortunately the Covid Pandemic was unfolding throughout this voyage and as the shelter-in-place order was implemented, the voyage took on a surreal quality. “The symbolism of my boat to others, and every other person I passed, to me, became wrapped in so many ideas of escapism, longing, and freedom. This reality that we now live in, and our desire to break free from it; I felt it first on that river and it has not left me since.”
