• My Statement
• My Brief Bio
• My Membership Organizations
• Image Gallery and Blog
• My teaching offerings

Note to my viewers:  

Please note that this is a very basic, do-it-yourself, one-page website with very limited capabilities. I am a novice, learning as I go and the "Site Builder" software provided by Register.com for this site is old and clunky. After much struggle, I finally began to enjoy working on this site, especially now that I am having success in getting more images posted!!! Yay!!!  Thanks for looking....

 

I am a Richmond, California based fabric artist, art-doll maker, and painter. I was born and raised in Michigan with creative, eccentric and inspiring parents — my artist father and my seamstress mother.

 

My father, Aimé Joseph Martinat, was a very fine artist who produced numerous drawings (mixed media/pencil/pen-and-ink) and paintings (oil and watercolor). His eariest work was in the Social Realism and Ash Can Schools of Art of the early 20th Century and Depression Era years. In the late 1940’s—early 1950’s his work became more abstract, and then later evolved into very detailed, realism in urban landscape and in nature in his own unique style…

His work and esthetic influenced me profoundly. I grew up drawing and painting next to him. I first experienced “pleine air” painting with him, from which I “inherited” my love for painting and drawing outdoors in nature. Aimé was indeed, a very accomplished artist. I plan to create a Blog or website dedicated to showing his life's work...

 

My Mother, Virginia Martinat, was a great seamtress. Since childhood, I have been an avid seamstress, inspired by my mother, watching her sew clothes and costumes since before I can remember. I have fond memories of going with her to fabric stores to look at patterns and buy fabric. I started sewing when I was about 6 or 7 years old, first making dolls and doll clothes. Then, as I grew into my teens, I made my own clothes. My mother got me started. She showed me how to use the sewing machine, follow a pattern, and how to sew many complicated garment construction details whenever I needed help. I made my first four-piece tailored tweed-wool suit during high school, pretty much all on my own. Thereafter, wherever I went, I always had to have a sewing machine at close hand, as well as my drawing and painting tools and materials.

My current passion for Art-Doll Making re-started in the early 2000’s as a renewal of my relationship with my younger sister. We shared childhood memories playing with dolls and making dolls together. In about 2002, I totally refurbished an old boudoire doll that belonged to my sister as a child and gave it to her as a gift. When we were kids, we set up complex, imaginative drama-plays on the bottom bunk of our bunk beds, with stories, scenes, furniture and hand-made costumes, culminating in having an “audience” sit and watch us present the “play”. 

  

During the years in the early 2000's, I worked at Stone Mountain & Daughter Fabrics in Berkeley. During that time, my exposure to the huge world of textile arts, art quilts, fabric collage, wearable art and figurative art-doll sculpture expanded by leaps and bounds. I discovered how much creativity in these media has been exploding for the last 30 years!

I also very much enjoyed working with customers, helping them with their projects and showing them how to do the skills they wanted to learn. Then I taught a variety of sewing classes at West Contra Costa Adult School. And among friends, I frequently find myself teaching sewing skills.

 

Last Spring 2015, I began renewing my screen-printing skills, taking a printing class at Richmond Art Center, CA. This includes building my own portable screen-printing set-up. It is a chalenge making it work for me in a very small work space at home.

I plan to integrate screen-printing with my other mixed media exlporations, including — free-form painting, stamping, stenciling, on fabric and paper with other textile arts, fabric collage and art doll making.

 

Coming soon:  I have other dolls I've been working on for a while. As soon as I finish them I will post pictures of them. One is a magnificent blue-glass eyed boudoure doll that I have completely remade... including resurfacing her composition head. She's almost done!

 

 Past Summer Event:

My art-doll, entitled "Adele Abayomo", was showing in the Annual Members' Show at the Richmond Art Center,

this Summer, from Sunday, June 14 to Friday, August 21, 2015...

 

 

 

"Adele Abayomi: Noble Kindness Brings Joy": from a Nigerian list of names.

I chose this name because it expresses the feeling I have in making this doll. She is a fabric sculpted, art-doll with a pieced fabric collage costume. Dimensions are 15" x 8" x8". This art-doll is the result of a challenge project from last Spring 2014 in which I participated as a member of the "Flying Phoebes Cloth Art Doll Club, which meets in Hayward, Ca. I finished the final details on this doll this May 2015.

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________