Martha Burkert is a Maine artist whose contemporary landscape painting reflects time spent between Yarmouth, Maine, and Dallas, Texas. Martha works from the places she inhabits, treating both interior and exterior landscapes as catalysts for color and structure. “I push and pull color around these forms to find combinations that feel right,” she says. “I am not restrained by local color or the rigid rules of perspective.”Martha paints small plein air studies in Maine, often on the islands and coastal paths she walks daily. Back in her Dallas studio, she develops those notes into larger canvases and panels, translating weather, light, and season into bolder compositions. Process guides her decisions: application of paint, the resonance of colors, the muscularity of shapes, and the temperature of light and dark. She flattens the picture plane when the image calls for clarity, or shifts the vantage point to look from above, choices informed by an earlier career as a photography stylist where perspective and editing shaped every frame.Gardens and flowering trees thread through Martha’s work, as do vessels and ceramics she hand builds and sometimes paints from life. In recent years she added works on paper with water-based media, laying branches and blooms on the studio table and painting them with the same directness she brings to the coast. The result reads as contemporary Maine art grounded in observation and energized by invention.Martha studied at the Maine College of Art after moving to Maine, an experience that anchored her practice in this landscape. She continues to divide the year between Dallas and Cousins Island, carrying each place into the other through paint.Learn more about Martha’s artistic process on Radio Maine.