Bold art rooted in modernism - NJ born - CLE home -modernist
Testimonials …
PK -”Your prints are absolutely stunning”.
Leslie A-“You are bold and you love color”. -
Robert W “-Love your texture buildups and you are a master at involving buff/beige in colors”.
Stephen C -“Your work has a lot of verve.”
Michael G -“Marti Higgins’ mixed media on canvas works make linear order out of chaos. Amendation, her largest work in From WOMAN 18, is a collage of text fragments, found paper, and painted swaths of color. Here, Higgins is expert in color theory, and she underscores the horizontal picture plane, creating a sense of energy from left to right, right to left”.
Hayley D -Painter and mixed media artist Marti Higgins continues to create work which blurs the line between abstract and representational art. Through collage, she builds abstract forms in a way which feels organic. Inversely, she uses paint to represent organic subjects with loose forms and colors, allowing our imagination to fill in the rest.
Artist Statement – 2025
The personal yet universal languages of color, repetition and shape are my inspiration to create. By carefully coordinating these languages I hope to provoke emotions that may have no definition. I strive to find balance and comfort in the chaos and believe my art touches on the human need for visual excitement balanced with stable and grounding rhythms. My landscapes mirror the mercurial entanglement of the changing seasons while my abstractions are energetic playful designs,
My techniques include experimenting with the relativity of color and shape and how they influence each other by proximity. I expose color relationships in a layer and reveal method providing peeks in glimmers and slices. Layering these elements shape relationships and solidify the composition. I find my way through my process with improvisation rather than visualizing a finished product. I am always inspired by the sense of disorder.
Bio - 2025 Growing up near New York City in the 1960s and 70s, I was moved by the bold gestural compositions and the seeming spontaneity in the work of the abstract expressionists. My parents subscribed to Look and Life magazines which consistently featured articles about contemporary art. There I found Alexander Calder’s mobiles and painted airplanes; the work of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock along with many abstract expressionists. I became fascinated by the simplified compositions and color juxtapositions of the post impressionists, most notably the collages of Romare Bearden. Art seemed to be everywhere; in advertising, on the sides of buses, billboards, newspapers; it seemed important. My class field trips were to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. The bold colors, rhythms and subject matter I attempt to express in my artwork are due to these early influences. After leaving the tri-state area for college, I married, worked in television and radio, moved to Cleveland in the late 1980’s and became a mom to two boys. In my 30’s I took a class entitled “Moving Toward Abstraction” at my local art center instructed by well-known Cleveland artist Margaret Arthur whose influence lives inside me still. Soon after, I began taking night and Saturday community college basic art courses before pursuing an art degree at Cleveland State University. In later years I worked as a garden designer; art in the form of arrangement of plants applying all the principles of design. I spent time as time program manager at Cleveland Botanical Garden.
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