Living color Looking deeper with Paula Martesian BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

The title of painter Paula Martesian’s current exhibition gives us a clever double reminder. It’s a Jungle Out There, at the Newport Art Museum through December 31, offers some esthetic sanctuary from the hurly-burly out there, and the Providence artist shows us what we might not be appreciating in such ordinary places as her unruly garden and the green spaces near her house, off north Benefit Street.

What strikes you first about Martesian’s work — especially if you step into the spacious main gallery and are surrounded by 17 of them — is their color. Vibrant, kinetic color comes at you. Lily-pad greens and earth tones glow in landscapes as though illuminated from behind. Rose blossoms swim out of mustard colors in one painting. Yellow branches burst upward out of purple and magenta, like reversed lightning, in another.

"Halsey Street Maple," the painting on the show’s announcement card, is afire, not really with autumn leaves but rather with the feelings they can prompt. "Prospect Street" is similarly aglow, more rosy pink and blank canvas brightening the feeling. At the top of this last one, a small triangle indicates branching, revealing that a massive vertical shape is a tree trunk — it might otherwise look like a twisting human torso.

In about a third of these paintings, readily recognizable flowers are the main subjects, like proffered bouquets. Sometimes those paintings flirt with prettiness, but there is always something else visually interesting going on — perhaps bold arcs of branches pulling your attention away — as if to say, don’t settle for only this when there is so much else to see.

As with the minimally indicated tree trunk, sometimes it’s quite evident that the artist is more interested in exploring forms and relationships than in reproducing her original visual experience. That, of course, reminds us of the Post-Impressionists and the way they break down what the eyes see before the mind reassembles vision into satisfactions.

"My influences are reasonably normal influences," Martesian declares. "They’re people like Cezanne and Bonnard."

A 1996 graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, as a painting major, Martesian says that her main influence locally has been painter Gordon Peers, a mentor at RISD who became a friend.

"I’m probably one of the few in my class who is still painting — the attrition rate is high," she notes. "It’s hard being a painter, I think. Painting is a very pure art. You face your stuff every day and you hope you like what you see."

In school — a strong colorist even then — Martesian was doing a lot of still lifes and figure painting, gradually getting into cityscapes and landscapes with figures in them. In her current show, which has mainly paintings from this year and last, not only are people gone but so too are all but vestiges of human presence — a statue here, a hint of a fence there.

"I respond very strongly to something that I see," she declares. "I’m stopped dead by certain things that I see. Just like — " and she slaps her hands together. "It affects me greatly. Color, place, the wonder of it. I’ll often drive by something two or three times; then I’ll try to put it in my head, my memory of how I feel about something and my reaction to it.

"And I’ll do a small sketch, black-and-white pencil sketches on stupid pieces of paper that you might find anywhere on your desk," she goes on. "Nothing frameable, nothing sellable, just a little thumbnail sketch of what I want to do. I’ll put little notes on it: ‘pinky, mossy green,’ or ‘silvery gold’ or something."

Born and bred in Pawtucket, in a family where theater- and museum-going was important, Martesian has been a long-standing promoter of the arts in Rhode Island. She and her husband, graphics designer Ken Carpenter, worked on the now defunct Quix arts magazine for nine years. She has recently co-chaired Gallery Night Providence with Cathy Bert of Bert Gallery. Her day job is as curator of painting for BankRI.

With that background, Martesian’s assessment of changes in the local art scene is especially valuable. Have things gotten better in the Renaissance City?

So many visual artists settled down in the state, thanks to RISD, by some counts the little state and city have more artists per capita than any other. So in her time Martesian hasn’t seen much improvement for artists being able to make a living making art. On the other hand, she says she can’t imagine living in a place where an artist gets more respect.

Martesian says, "I wander around in cut-up jeans and paint — I’m not exactly someone who shops at Talbots, you know? And a lot of my neighbors might be. But they understand who I am, and there are no judgments. So being an artist is an accepted thing here. There’s a great deal of praise and interest in the arts.

"I can’t imagine living anywhere else where there are so many artists and it’s so accepted to be an artist," she adds. "You’re not an oddball or a weirdo or a freak or anything."

But for artists to be able to sell more work, she says, the state needs to become an arts destination.

"I think we’ve started on that road in the last couple of years, but we haven’t gone that far down the road," she says.

"So, yes it’s changed — but no it hasn’t," Martesian concludes with a laugh.