Vickie Martin is a long time resident of Guelph, Ontario and an active member of her community.

After many years in the mainstream workforce, art has become her soul purpose. Her paintings reflect landscapes, abstracts and florals using paint mediums: oil, watercolour, acrylic and mixed media.

The adult onset of visual impairment has awakened her ability to express the emotion and the atmosphere of the place in which she finds her self through her paintings. Her work expresses the inner soul of her being, giving each painting its own special colour and dimension. Each painting reflects a piece of her self. As such, the greatest gift is achieving the moment of connection that a person experiences, when they communicate with one of her paintings. That connection between an individual and the inner soul of Vickie Martin is the essence of why her art is created. Vickie often says that her work is a gift from God because this talent was not shown to her until she lost her sight. However, in retrospect, she does say that she can see better now than she ever could.

Vickie has shown her work in many art venues: Kloepfer’s Gallery, University of Guelph – University Club, Art-in-Guelph Gallery, Creative Arts Association exhibits – Expressions and Painting-on-the-Green, Kaleidoscope Café, Guelph Community Arts Tour, Guelph Arts Festival Studio Tour, Oakville Art in the Park Show, Credit Village Outdoor Art Show, Guelph Art in the Street Show, Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, Guelph Civic Museum, Guelph Studio Tour, Gift of Art at Cambridge Galleries, and the Toronto Art Expo.

Her belief in giving back to society is sustained with the many donations of her work she has offered to such organisations as:

Guelph Wellington Aids Assoc, Guelph Wellington Hospice, Guelph Wellington Stonehenge, Arc Industries, CT Scanner for the local hospital, Women of Distinction Awards (WMCA), Kiwanis Club of Guelph and Lakeside Church Missions.

ARTIST STATEMENT
Vickie Martin is a Guelph Visionary artist, who uses the concept of abstraction in her paintings. In mathematics and computer science mathematical proofs and pseudo computer code is used to abstract ideas, to build structures, and to prove if a problem is computable or not. There is a relationship between what already exists and what may be possible. Often abstraction is used to explore the universe for new thoughts to emerge and for new entities to be developed.

Instead of using mathematical proofs and pseudo computer code to form structure and relationship we use composition, colour and texture. I consider myself as an abstract artist because my compositions lend one to mind exploration. In my abstract landscapes I use unconventional colours for trees or other objects. I use different mediums such as molding paste, granular gel, collage layering, and oil impasto to create structure, depth and different view points in my pure abstract pieces.

Each piece is presented to me through dreams and meditation since I am a visually impaired artist. Because of this, each painting not only has an outer message but often has an inner message.