"A Natural Feeling"

Art has been important to Joan Martin for as long as she can remember. And as long as she remembers goes back to magical Sunday afternoons in Lawrence of the 1930s.

“As a little kid, I would lie on the floor on my stomach at our house in the 1900 block of Tennessee and would draw with a pencil on tablet paper while my grandparents were visiting with company from the AME Church,” Martin recalls.

Growing up in Lawrence, she continued to study art at public schools, where her talent was recognized and nurtured by teachers, including a Liberty Memorial art teacher who asked Martin to help paint a Christmas mural at the school. By that time, Martin already was seeking out other projects, such as helping one of the black sororities at the University of Kansas by painting backdrops for their fashion shows.

After she graduated from Liberty Memorial in 1950, Martin left for Omaha to briefly live with an aunt who was going to help her settle into Chicago and enroll in art school.

But other plans emerged.

Instead of going to Chicago, Martin accepted a marriage proposal from a boyfriend who had enrolled at KU, so she returned to Lawrence. She and her new husband moved to Kansas City in the early 1950s where he took a job with the postal service, and they began to raise a family. They had a daughter, then a son, and Martin began a new career, working as an OB technician at St. Luke’s Hospital.

But through the moves, the new family and the new job, Martin continued painting.

“I never gave up my painting,” she says. “I always painted.”

Though she had experimented with different media in her art Martin gravitated to watercolors, a preference she retains to this day. She would find her materials where she could, stopping in at art stores after work or on her days off, between all her other obligations, and she would continue to paint.

By 1977, Martin and her first husband had divorced and her children were away at college, so she relocated to California, taking a job at Rothman Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles and continuing to create watercolors. Although she worked full shifts at the hospital, she took formal painting lessons at a college while giving private lessons and teaching group classes at churches and through community organizations.

Martin says her time in California exposed her to new colors and beautiful scenery, but it didn’t necessarily affect the style of her work. She says the landscapes, the still-life work and everything she creates with watercolors are not based on any real imagery, but on vignettes she composes in her head and allows to emerge in the brief seconds that the watercolor runs onto her canvas.

“I like to go places. I like to see the ocean and the mountains, and then I go home and paint,” says Martin. “Most all of my paintings are from images in my head, like from a movie. It seems strange, and it is hard to describe, but for me it is very natural.”

Martin continued to paint in her time away from work, bringing new creations to galleries for shows, one of which led to a tremendous boost in her identity as an artist.

Preparing to show a work that she called Sweet Pear at a gallery on Wilshire Boulevard, Martin stopped by the frame shop to pick it up for the showing and was greeted by the frame artist telling her, “Sweetheart, that painting is going to do something for you.” Initially, she dismissed this

as a nice, but empty, compliment and simply enjoyed the atmosphere at what was then her biggest show.

“There were three floors and some 500 works of art: sculptures, oil and watercolors. It was a grand affair and I enjoyed talking to people. At the end, they gave out the prizes, and the prize for the watercolor was given last. When the lady announcing them said, ‘Will Joan Martin please come up to the stage,’ I was dumbfounded. My legs were so weak I could hardly make it up there.”

Sweet Pear was a source of immense pride for Martin. Because it reinforced her identity as a talented artist, it was no surprise that she held on to it until it seemed to have a new purpose.

“It was the first work that I really felt like I had accomplished something; it was special to me,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to turn it loose, but something came to me one day and said, ‘let it go.’ I realized that only by letting it go could I replace it with something new. And I knew something else would come into my life.”

In fact, several works of art came into her life after she took a job as a private cook to Lucy and Paul Whittier. Known widely for their philanthropy and the fortune that Paul had created with his financial company, the Whittiers supplied Martin not only with a good salary and a chance to travel but also with something she regarded as equally important—a place to paint in her free time and compartments for storing her work. They did this without never really knowing the quality of Martin’s work until one day Lucy asked to see her paintings and then brought Paul in to view them.

“He came into the kitchen where I was working and said, ‘I didn’t know that you painted like that,’” Martin recalls. “I told him I loved to paint. He asked if I would sell one, and when I consented, he asked if I would take a thousand dollars for it. I almost fainted. That was the first thousand-dollar painting I sold.”

Though Martin would go on to sell other paintings, she now works on a smaller scale. In 2006, she returned to Lawrence to be near her son. Until 2018, she gave private lessons and taught in churches, through parks and recreation department classes and at the senior center.

She delighted in working with students though she described the time as more of sharing art than instructing people in it. Art requires skill, says Martin, but it also requires something she describes as “a natural feeling.”

That feeling has been with Martin all her life, and it continues to be with her to this day as she enjoys being at home doing exactly what she loves, and exactly how she loves doing it.

“I don’t paint large paintings anymore, but my art hasn’t changed,” says Martin. “I paint at home with watercolors, and I turn on the television and watch sports: the NFL, basketball, the Jayhawks. I paint and watch; I paint whatever I feel like painting.”