KOREY MARTIN b. 1989, Tennessee

Korey Martin is an artist and illustrator living with his wife and two cats in a little town in southwest Michigan where, in addition to drawing, he enjoys riding his bike, writing and occasionally working at a local farm store. After dropping out of both The Pacific Northwest College of Art and The University of Utah and spending his 20s participating in a small DIY scene as a musician, cartoonist and library aide, he finished his BFA at the School of the Art Insitute where he studied garment construction, printmaking and sculpture. 

He was born and raised somewhere on the Appalachian Cumberland Plateau where he explored the strange and beautiful hollows surrounding his home, alternating between amateur fantasist and naturalist--finding solace somewhere between. As a child, his greatest fears were vampires and all of the earth's mysteries being discovered before he'd be old enough to explore it, that the world would be summed up in a book before he could see it. 

After an extended hiatus, he found himself drawing once again in 2020 following a botched grant-sponsored study trip to a "scarecrow village" in Nagoro, Japan, when an interest in both flower and jazz arrangments and the films of Jacques Tatí and Yasujiro Ozu unexpectedly led him back to the medium as the obvious answer to his own increasingly urgent spiritual and creative questions.

With materials that feel commonplace, forgiving and limiting--rulers, newsprint and pencils--he uses humor and a light grip on reality to draw with what his wife calls a "summarized perspective". He often finds himself describing his work as a process of "remembering" or "reminding", motivated by a deep desire to nuruture intuition and through it a sensitivity to the forces, or élan vital, that move life on earth. 

He is transfixed by movement, often dreaming of transportation and automobiles, and is frequently halted by the wind as it moves through the treetops. This movement captivates him, and makes him wonder, like the wind--this thing that, as breathing, seems to have no true beginning or end--might drawing also be moved by similar vital forces, finding expression and apprehension through the human senses as sight, sound, smell, taste, motion, feeling? If this is how we come to know life, it must too be how we come to know ourselves--a great undertaking. The greatest mysteries seem to be out in the open. Like the surface of a deep, dark lake, drawing was one such thing for Korey, right there the whole time, horribly obvious, right under his nose, apparent and yetincomprehensible.

By evoking the familiar--expressed through the medium, materials, subject matter--he grapples with this curiosity, believing that he may become better acquainted with the ways in which life is deeply mysterious, yet intimately known through what is most apparent, most obvious, like contemplating the surface of a deep, dark lake. He has observed through personal life, music and art that expansion or new understanding arises from discrepancies between expectation and reality--a precious and fleeting dissonance that leads to sudden, gradually broadened awareness of the whole of which he and his drawings are only part. This feels to him like an underlying harmony that, perhaps paradoxically, critically features chaos not as its opposite, but as its composition. 

Like a stone in a bridge or a cat's hair, Korey contemplates the notion that to draw something is to draw life, all beginning as a single, shared moment that has since continued to transform. For this reason, he believes that his drawings are nothing new, but rather more of what already is. It calls to mind something Miles Davis once said. "It's not the keys you play, it's the keys you don't play." And so, the limits of actuality do not need to be grasped to be felt, and in fact find expression through what small bits we are able to glean, like a hug, wind through the trees, a wave crashing on the shore, a drawing. 

And despite all of this, he suspects that, perhaps drawing itself is the idea behind his drawings. 

He thanks you for your curiosity in his work.