"Deborah Martin is blessed with a technique that allows her to portray space and the things in it with a quavering, almost feverish luminosity as she trains her eye on all forms of the American outback.

Martin is probably best known for her paintings of the blasted communities that surround the Salton Sea. But she paints other parts of the California desert as well, and has also painted the rural American south, the nether parts of Cape Cod, and other places in this country where society dissolves and individuals find solitude whether or not they seek it.

What interests Martin – whose pictures are full of human presence but devoid of humans – is not the mundane or the abject, but how habitation seems only to amplify the emptiness of the land itself. In this respect she extends Edward Hopper’s lonely realms into the context of “new topographic”

-Peter Frank Fabrik Magazine, Los Angeles

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Martin’s noirish and oddly poignant images offer a hauntingly intimate elegy for small town American roadsides, refracted through a grim cataract of muffled sunlight, dusty colors, and bleached, exhausted exposures. Her vacant neighborhoods suggest a peaceful, bucolic apocalypse in which human abandonment is perhaps as much blessing as curse.

Her work dwells within a compositional formality – a visitor’s sidewalk stance that captures the essentially public vista of driveway, yard, front porch – yet her portraitist’s eye conjures an emotional complexity nearly operatic in scope: within the silent, vacant architecture, human drama seems to exist more powerfully in allusion.

--Quintan Ana Wikswo, Los Angeles

--Ted Quinn. Z 107.7 FM , Joshua Tree

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It seems to me that Home is a lot like Love. No amount of poetry, music, art, life, death, or disappointment will ever suffice to complete the catalog of its permutated meanings—which won’t stop anyone from trying. It literally means something absolutely different to each living creature, and without ideas like Home, Love, and even God, there’d be no paintings, no pop music, and no novels.

Home, again like Love, is an emotion as well as a social construct, a place to leave, return to, miss, defend, dream of, or destroy. It’s a place of specificity, but does it even have to be a place at all? It can be a person (parent, lover, pet) or an illusion, or a karmic goal-post that keeps moving. It’s often aspirational, symbolizing achievement, security, and retreat.

But even with the endless catalog of definition, prayer, fixation, metaphor, image, symbol, myth, purchase, and confession, human nature will endlessly prompt us to add to the archive. For every poet and painter—and for that matter every living person—believes themselves capable of shedding new light and adding new insight to our soul-situation. And they are right.

The residents of the settlements flanking California’s Salton Sea—an artificial lake intended as a desert oasis resort that quickly became a toxic, calcified symbol of catastrophe—think they live in an Earthly Paradise. They are proud to call it Home, and are busy making improvements, landscaping, and building baseball parks. It’s a salt-flat with dilapidated, sagging structures lining empty streets, paint peeling away in the sun, devoid of apparent activity. Its short, blacktop roads all lead to a lakeshore, the sandy beaches of which are littered with sunken vehicles and the skeletons of four-eyed fish. And as for front lawns, well, you can’t grow plastic grass...

Martin’s work is a kind of interpretative documentation; she stays true to the reality of her selected places. In addition to the Salton Sea sequel, she’s currently at work on a series about Cape Cod’s Narrowlands—a more vegetated but no less remote “vacation” destination less about the desert and more about vines, nature’s reclaiming of the cultivated, the process of decay, and the beauty in the breakdown.