My name is Martha Lee Turner. (Call me “Martha” or “Marta”). I am an artist based in the Chicago area. In the past few years, I have combined art-making with slow travel, maintaining an itinerant studio practice. My works are inspired by the processes of change in the natural world and by the effects of light.
Beginning in April, 2026, I am staying, for a while, in the greater Asunción area of Paraguay. You can contact me here.
Growing up, I understood art-making as simply one of the things humans do. My mother was an amateur oil painter and one of the many the women trained as draftsmen during the second world war (and one of the very few who persisted in that profession into the 1960s). I learned a lot of art basics from her. Color theory, for example. She arranged my box of 101 crayolas by color, and rearranged it whenever it got out of order, until I was hooked. Then she said, “you know, you could do that.” It seemed so simple when it was done for me, but raised so many questions when I tried to do it! My first experiments with calligraphy were copying lettering examples from her 1940s drafting text. When I was in high school, I painted a few landscapes in oils alongside her.
She also took me with her, walking in the woods, or wading in a river, or watching a sunrise. I learned to be quiet, to be present without necessarily talking all the time, and to observe my surroundings. Once, when my first-grade class went on a picnic, we parked along the road to our picnic area. The woods were very close to the road there; their tall, cool, silent presence overwhelmed me. As my classmates erupted from the cars, I told them, in hushed voice: “Walk like you’re in the woods!” It was an utterly unsuccessful attempt at communication—though, possibly, it is the main thing that I have ever had to say.
I have made art of many different kinds, all along the decades and changes of my life. How could I not? But somehow, through most of that time, I assumed that any real impact I could have would be through words and concepts. I worked in a law office, I earned a PhD in early church history, I worked as a freelance writer, and then as a technical writer in healthcare statistics. And I painted and drew.
In the past decade, I have grown more and more serious about art-making. First, it was photography. Then I turned a small multi-purpose room in my Albany Park, Chicago, apartment into a painting studio. I took some classes at Chicago’s Lillstreet Art Center.
When I began traveling at the end of 2023, I thought I would have to set aside art-making, at least for a while. But no; art-making wouldn’t let me go. Soon I was traveling with my single checked bag half full of clothes and half full of art supplies. For nine months, I made my art in a studio space inside an art supplies store in Panamá.
As I travel, I’ve been using botanical illustration as a way come to terms with new surroundings and ecosystems. Close observation and conversion of that observation into mark-making is, for me, a way to transform the unfamiliar into home. My botanical illustrations proved unexpectedly popular while I was in Panamá. That reception, in turn, led to a more ambitious botanical project, one involving the deep and rich botanical traditions of Paraguay.
I continue to be profoundly inspired by the natural world. Imagery from my decades near the southern end of Lake Michigan, with its dune-and-swale wetlands and slow-growing stands of black oak, continue to appear in my work. Elements from the Ozark landscapes of my childhood creep in. These are now joined by themes from the new and sometimes amazing topographies, climates, ecosystems, and cultures of other places.
What most moves me is light and shadow, and the traces of process across the natural world. The lovely, impartial way that light falls across all things; the interwoven evidences of growth and decay; the transcendent that is wholly natural, the natural that somehow discloses the transcendent. That bright streak of… grace? holiness? … running through all things. Trying to make some echo of that visible, I am, essentially, a bit of a bird-dog: “Look! There! THERE!”
Maybe some part of my work will resonate for you. I would be so honored if it served to point you toward some small, half-forgotten reason to smile.