This mixed media artist, who has a studio at Anchorlight, follows her intuition to build her energetic abstract paintings.
by Colony Little | photography by Joshua Steadman

What’s first legible in Martha Thorn’s work is color: layers of vibrant, abstract shapes that emerge from soft shadows rendered in acrylic and spray paint. In a piece titled Into the Ether, for example, ribbons of cerulean, olive and aqua mingle with sharp shards of white and ghosts of gray, a cacophony emerging from a background of concentric boxes.

“I’ll typically start by covering the canvas, just to get rid of the white,” Thorn says. From there, the Raleigh-based artist begins to add layers through various mediums and techniques: spray-painting one layer, dripping acrylic paint onto another, pouring paint and tilting the canvas to create a marbling effect. Each layer of the work is in conversation with the next. “I’m always reacting to what I did last,” she says. “There’s a lot of back and forth until I decide a piece is finished.”

Thorn grew up in Charlotte within a family that had an eye for classical art. Her mother studied art history, both of her grandmothers were artists and one of her great-uncles was a professional portrait artist. But it was an encounter with a surrealist painting in grade school that opened her eyes to a new form of expression. “I saw an image of Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine, and I was mesmerized,” she says of the painting, in which black-ink birds offer a jarring contrast to their watercolor-soft background. “It was so fresh and new and different from anything I’d ever seen.”

Thorn explored painting in an abstract expressionist style through her teens, incorporating drips of acrylic and spray paint inspired by a school trip to graffiti-filled New York City in the 1980s. When she was accepted into the art program at Western Carolina University, she opted to pursue graphic design to find a more financially reliable use for her talents. While in school, she met her husband Jeffrey, whose work in the technology industry moved them throughout the Southeast and Texas before settling in Raleigh more than 30 years ago.

Between moves, work and raising a family, painting was a hobby for many years. “Because I had so many other plates spinning in the air, it just wasn’t the main focus,” Thorn says. But as her three children got older, she was able to secure time and space to create more fervently, applying for grants to jump-start her practice, including one from the United Arts Council to convert her garage into a studio. In 2008, Thorn participated in her first group show, at the Visual Art Exchange, where Lump Gallery co-founder Bill Thelan awarded her a second-place prize in the juried exhibition.

Through that experience, Thorn discovered a nurturing, supportive community of artists who, like her, were beginning their professional art careers with guidance from the VAE. “That was the jumping-off point for a lot of people,” she says. “I was good friends with Sarah Powers, Brandon Cordrey [both former directors at VAE] and other staff there who would encourage me to apply for grants and
other opportunities.”

Thorn continued to paint out of her garage until four years ago, when she secured a studio at Anchorlight. There, she says, she has found an equally nurturing and challenging community with artist neighbors whose styles and approaches differ from her own.

One fellow Archorlight artist is figurative painter Clarence Heyward. “Martha and I come from completely different walks of life, but our interests in art  — color, technique and style — and our curiosity about different perspectives is the glue that holds our friendship together,” says Heyward. “Our conversations range from newly found paint colors to what’s for dinner to political debates, and our impromptu critiques help each of us make our studio practices stronger.”

Thorn recalls a recent “spirited” debate with Heyward about a certain shape, bunny ears, that kept repeating in her work. “Clarence always calls me out! He said, What are those? I just quickly made something up,” Thorn laughs. “In reality, I didn’t know why the ears came to me or what compelled me to incorporate them. He let it go that time, but often he’ll continue to question me until I can articulate why I used a certain shape or color.” 

But days after that encounter, the origin of the shape revealed itself: a black ceramic mug in her kitchen cabinet, which featured a tiki-inspired floral pattern that echoes the bunny ears on her canvas. “This coffee cup was my husband’s,” she says, sharing that she lost Jeffrey in 2023 after a long battle with ALS. “I use the word ‘intuition’ a lot because I try not to filter too much into what I’m doing, but I’m constantly absorbing images that have meaning to me and reiterating them in my work.”

While caretaking for Jeffrey, Thorn placed painting on hold, but in the last year she’s found herself creating work that expresses her feelings and memories from their time together. One example is a piece titled Tear. On a vibrant plane of canary yellow, emerald green and shocking pink shapes, black pillars and symmetrical chartreuse lobes — those bunny ears, set on their sides — resemble butterfly wings. On close inspection, there are two black tears embedded between the ears. “That was the first piece I completed after Jeff died,” she says. “I don’t want anyone to look at my work and say, oh, that’s about death, I like to keep things more open. But oftentimes the meaning of my paintings become clear after they’re completed.”

Earlier this year, Thorn participated in the No Boundaries International Artist Residency on Bald Head Island, a cultural exchange program that brings artists from around the world together with North Carolina residents to collaborate, network and produce work. “The work that I’m doing now is distilled from that experience,” she says. “With my husband’s death, I think about nature a lot — how we’re made, what happens after we die — and it all comes into play in my work.”

Thorn’s non-didactic approach, combined with her process of creating layers in her paintings, allows for multiple entry points to the work. And her reliance on intuition gives Thorn the freedom to express how she experiences the surrounding world: “These paintings are a metaphor for all the layers within me.

 This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of WALTER magazine.