WCFA 36th Annual RI Open

Juror: Paula Martiesian

About Paula;

With a fifty-year career as an artist, Paula Martiesian has been painting her entire adult life.  Represented by both the Bert Gallery and Charlestown Gallery, Martiesian is one of the founding members of Gallery Night Providence.  She is a strong advocate for the visual arts in Rhode Island and has earned awards for her work from Business Volunteers for the Arts and WaterFire Providence.  Her paintings have been featured in regional galleries and museums and can be found in public and private collections.  

She was the editor and co-publisher of Quix Art Magazine (1991-1998), a quarterly publication focusing on the cultural scene in Rhode Island.  She works as a freelance arts writer, a visiting critic, a teacher and as the exhibitions curator for the BankRI Galleries.  A native Rhode Islander, she attended RISD both as a child and later as an adult, graduating in 1976.  

Martiesian’s paintings focus on nature, both in the urban environment and in the wild, undeveloped stretches of the landscape.  She is a colorist at heart, balancing the abstractions of space with her response to the natural world. 

We asked Paula about her process in selecting artwork for a curated exhibit, and she shared this with us;

In my fifty-plus years as a painter and thirty years as an exhibitions curator, I’ve seen a lot of regional artworks.  I look for three things:

True originality, which is rare and often only comes late in an artist’s career

Competency in one’s chosen medium

and a certain, often unexplainable, emotional embracing of a particular viewpoint.

You will see, in the artwork I have chosen, many examples of one or more of the qualities I’ve described above.