BILL MARTIN (1943–2008)

Artist Bill Martin, a realist whose landscapes and minutely detailed scenes were widely exhibited and collected, died on October 28, reports Jesse Hamlin in the San Francisco Chronicle. Born in San Francisco, Martin got his bachelor’s and master’s of fine arts at the San Francisco Art Institute. Over the years, he taught at the Art Institute, UC Berkeley, San Jose State University, and College of the Redwoods. In recent years, he taught a weekly figure-drawing class at the Mendocino Arts Center. His work was shown at museums around the country and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Among other places, his paintings can be found in the Oakland Museum’s collection and at San Francisco International Airport. Reviewing a gallery show of Martin’s in 1989, art critic Kenneth Baker wrote that the painter practiced “a representational style so fastidious that everything he paints takes on a preternatural clarity.”