Martha Apple

Hailing from Illinois, Martha Apple grew up amidst verdant fields, gardens, and hardwood trees near Lake Michigan and Chicago, where the Apples were frequent visitors to the Art Institute and other great museums. Apple has bachelor’s degrees in Botany and Geography and a master’s degree in Botany from the University of Montana, and holds a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of Rhode Island. While at U of M and URI, Apple took a range of art classes. She is now Professor Emerita at Montana Technological University, where her research emphasizes climate change and its effects on alpine plants and microbes. Apple’s favorite haunts include books and stories, labs with microscopes, summer mountain snowfields, ski hills, and bicycle routes. Among other places, she has previously exhibited her work in a solo show called Botanography at the Stoplight Gallery in Anaconda, Montana.

 

Apple's recent work is a point in the continuum of her ongoing exploration of botanical forms and interactions among colors. Imagery from the natural world appears repeatedly in these works, partly because of her experience and knowledge as a scientist, and partly as a means of interpreting places, seasons, observations and thoughts. The larger format paintings allow the incorporation of symbols, various forms and color fields, depictions of animals, and representative images of bona fide and invented flowers and other botanical structures. These works consist mostly of oil but occasionally of acrylic and/or watercolor paint on canvas and on primed and raw linen. For any given painting, she works with an easel, and/or by placing the work-in-progress against a wall or on the floor. While she is keenly interested in photography and quick watercolors, the on-canvas paintings allow for introspective time and space.