(California - rolling hills with large white clouds)

Xavier Martinez

An early color monotype by Xavier Martinez of the California coast. The work is trimmed to the edges, as is usual with his work. It is signed with his red XM in a circle monogram.

Martinez was an integral part of the Bay Area’s late 19th century art renaissance, helping to establish it as a destination for international artists, and to form its artistic identity, in his work as both an artist and a teacher. However, the influence of the European Tonalists, to whom he was exposed when he studied on scholarship in Paris, clearly left its mark on the artist, as is evident in this moody landscape monotype.

Martinez was a pivotal part of a group of San Francisco Bay Area printmakers that became interested in color monotype afer the 1906 earthquake. Martinez and Clark Hobart both exhibited color monotypes at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, the only printmakers to do so. In 1912, he co-founded the California Society of Etchers.