Details fascinate artist Vikki J. Martin. They have all of her life. Her work stems from this fascination coupled with a back injury she received in 1987 that caused her to look deeper into the work of nature and of man.
"A lot of times, I'll describe my work as being realistic with a twist of surrealism," said Ms. Martin, whose art is hanging at Midland College's McCormick Gallery in the Allison Fine Arts Building through February 15. "The work is meticulously detailed but often times there is a dreamlike or mysterious quality.
"I work primarily in diptych format, a two-sided panel format. What I am doing in my work is creating and setting up comparisons between objects."
Following the automobile accident that left her with chronic whiplash injury, Ms. Martin began drawing the human skeleton.
"I wanted to understand what had happened to my back so I began doing these investigative drawings using the human skeleton," Ms. Martin said. "Then I became interested in the relationship of the skeleton to architecture.
"The whole idea of looking at the skeleton also came out of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. His drawings are documentation about his thought processes about life - an investigative process. I began to try and incorporate some of those things Leonardo did. One was the human skeleton and the other was the use of text."
This work began evolving around five years ago into an interest in comparing not only the natural world and manmade items but also the sacred and the secular.
"We live in such a secular-driven world, I think there really isn't a lot of time for reflection," said Ms. Martin, noting she has a "personal love and interest in" non-Western art, particularly Hindu and Native American Pre-Columbian art.
By viewing art, sometimes that can pitch us into the sacred or get us to think about things which are sacred or meditative about life," said Ms. Martin. "In a way, when you have looked at an object as long as I end up looking at something, there is a meditative quality to it."
The Midland College showing represents her first in West Texas. J. Don Wallace, manager of McCormick Gallery, heard about her work from a gallery committee member and an invitation was issued to show at the college.
'It's a very physical and intellectual type of work." Wallace said of the pieces in the exhibition. "They make me think quite a bit when I look at them."
The exhibition is called "Honoring the Natural and the Manmade: Works on Paper." Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. For more information call 685-4770.
Ms. Martin, who received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Tulsa and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, has been teaching full time for two decades. For the past 19 years, she has taught art and art history at the Episcopal School of Dallas.
"Most of my friends who are artists do other things to make a living," said Ms. Martin. "In my case, I teach, and fortunately, I enjoy that. I have a lot of students who have majored in art."
Although Ms. Martin has been "very interested" in art all her life and showed an early aptitude for drawing, she credits an opportunity she had when she was growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma to study with "the wife of a well-known Texas painter named Alexandre Hogue" as encouraging her to pursue art as a career.
"I think teachers have a great impact on students," Ms. Martin said. "They can transform students lives."