“It took me a long time to feel like I actually owned my work,” says Donald Martiny, this week’s profile for Under the Radar. By which he means he spent many years looking for a voice that seemed to him genuinely, uniquely his. With a few exceptions—Carol Hepper, for example, who was making adventurous signature work in her twenties—many of the artists on this site spend years searching for that approach or style or process (whatever you choose to call it). And the decades of questing may not be as unusual as you think. When I interviewed El Anatsui a few years back on the occasion of his retrospective in Denver, I was surprised to find that much of his work was rather humdrum until he found the formula for making huge drop-dead gorgeous tapestry “sculptures” from discarded liquor-bottle seals. When his works became one of the hits of the 2007 Venice Bienniale, his star was launched—at age 63.
So too with Martiny, who worked for 25 years in the advertising business, always painting on the side. Now in his mid-sixties, he is showing in galleries across the country, has landed a prestigious commission from the new World Trade Center, and any minute now is on his way to oversee an installation in West Germany.
The lesson is simple: Hang in there. Good things can happen at any time. And if you want to really push the clichés: Better late than never.
Donald Martiny at work.