(California church)

Fred Martin

An image of a church in the San Francisco Bay Area, Fred Martin's birthplace where he has remained since his birth in 1927. In the late 1950s Martin began doing oil paintings on small formats, rejecting the popular oversized canvases that many Bay Area Modernists were drawn to at the time. Some of these paintings, images of the Bay Area in miniature, were hung at The Six Gallery along with his scupltures when Allen Ginsberg read his groundbreaking poem, "Howl".

This appears to be a church or other landmark building of the Bay Area with its Mission style stucco and belltower. Its murky, almost monochromatic palette brings to mind the famous, ubiquitous fog of San Francisco, and the sense of muffled quietude it envokes.