About Me-
Hi welcome to my site, my name is Toni Martinez! I am working on my BFA in studio art at Appalachian State University, with a concentration in painting. I have attended a couple of classes at Penland Shcool of craft as well, which heavily influneced my art pratice. I'm currently working on primarily paintings and textile art, but I have worked in a variety of mediums. My practice is heavily influenced by my Queer identity as well as surrealist art, which you can read more about my theory on below.
Artist Statement-
My paintings have been described as indistinguishable from oil paintings, which as an acylic painter, says a lot about how I move the paint around and where I take inspiration from. I have spent many years honing my craft to be able to paint as such, and have always strived to create work that is smooth. Recently that has shifted, and I have intorduced texture and abstraction into the worlds I create on canvas. No longer am I striving for likeness, but instead to create feeling, movement, and to entice viewers into something they may not fully grasp.
My work is very focused on exploration as it pretains to my own idenity and queer and transness as a whole and as a genre of study and existence. I focus heavily on the figure. To me, the figure as expressed by me, painted by me, drawn by me, is undoubtedly queer. to be a queer artist is to make queer art, and the figure, which has many roots in queer art history, is one of the most poignant expressions of queerness that I believe there is. To have a body in our current world is to be seen with gender and expectations of sexuality, and to paint a body is to see and to know a body and its form, beyond gender and sexuality. I paint as a non gendered person, figures that are flesh, that are beauty, that are a feeling in the depths of your brain, crawling on your skin, not gender, and to not be gendered is, within this world we live in, queer.
In my art I pride myself on my resourcefullness and my ability to explore and experiment. I recently realized how important the tactility of something is to me, and how much being able to feel and touch something impacts my view of it. In lieu of this, I began using modeling paste in my paintings to create texture, and began working in a new medium - textiles. Textile art, and specifically wearable art, allowes me to not only create an image of the figure, but to have my work interact with a figure in a natural and beautifully queer way. Clothing, the fabric draped over a person's body, has been gendered nearly since its creation. I have been fighting against this for many years, dressing differently from how people percieve you are supposed to be, can often be taxing and ostracising. Now, as the maker of clothes, I make textile art that is exciting, new, and for everyone. Each piece is meant to be worn by anyone who wants to wear it. I find and recycle pieces in a variety of sizes, usually leaning more large so as to provide more people the opportunity to fit into it. The imagery that I create on the surface of these pieces is a collage of different textures and colors, which overlap with ink to create a different form of the worlds I create on canvas, still related, but changed into a new language.
These several forms of art that I make come together to create for me a wonderous language of queerness, a symphony of feelings, that I find a home and solace in. My work so heavily influences my perception of the world we live in, and vice versa. I can only hope that the viewers and owners of my work are able to find the kind of home and comfort in the worlds I create that I do, no matter if they consider themselves queer or not. Many people can find comfort in a world without categories and boxes.