FromThe New Yorker: “’Serendipity has dictated all my choices in the collages I’ve made since 2006,’ the artist Ruth Marten says. For her most recent collection, ‘Fountains & Alligators,’ she has added India ink and watercolor to early-nineteenth-century prints of sombre well-to-do Parisians. ‘Apparently it was altogether natural at the beginning of the nineteenth century to strike a pose of lamentation,’ she said.
Marten first came to attention back in the early seventies, as one of only a few female tattoo artists and as a pioneer of underground art. She has since made a career in drawing, painting, sculpting, and magazine illustration. She purchased her first print at a flea market: ‘The sparseness within the rectangle the figures inhabit easily allowed for my additions,’ she writes in the introduction to a recently published collection of the ‘Fountains & Alligators’ series, ‘and the modesty of the poses allowed me to turn the figures into gushing fountains or force crocodilian cohabitation upon them.’ The new images she creates are so seamless that one can’t readily recognize her delicate enhancements…” (For the full story and more images, click here)