Courtesy of Prizer Arts & Letters
"You Are What You Did" says the print from graphic designer Rick Griffith's Matter shop in Denver. I bought that print because I'd seen another iteration of it in Austin's Northern-Southern Gallery months before and hadn't been able to get it – the message, the type treatment – out of my mind. Which has nothing but also everything to do with Andy St. Martin and "The Weight," his new show of original works at Prizer Arts and Letters on East Cesar Chavez.
"Like all my paintings, collage, and drawings," says St. Martin, "these new ones are a chain reaction of reactions, reflections, decisions (about them, paintings, and life and light, literally). They are my activity, evaluation, commitment incarnate, and contract with myself." They've been those things since the artist first picked up a brush, a pencil, a pair of scissors and some glue. They've been those things, at least subtly influenced by our own river city, since the New Hampshire-born artist moved here in 1991 to participate in a workshop conducted by dancer Deborah Hay. They've been those things while St. Martin has worked, is working, and will work in a studio among the other makers (woodcrafters, blacksmiths) of the Splinter Group. They'll be those things as long as he's doing them.