Betty Martin knew she was home the first time she stood on Hawaiian lava rock. “That was it,” she told me from her studio in Portlock. “I walked on the lava, and that was where I belonged.”
It turns out Martin’s journey toward that understanding covered a fair amount of the globe. Originally from France, she was raised in Paris and Copenhagen, but after beginning her career in Europe, the artist later moved to New York City, where she lived for two decades.
The scope of Martin’s work has also covered a great deal of ground, beginning with sculpture at a young age and tran- sitioning toward painting and drawing during her Masters of
Fine arts degree studies at L’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. She also learned opera set design at that time and worked on a range of theater and opera produc- tions, leading to jobs in the European film industry and later lucrative gigs painting sets for music videos shot in New York.
“I worked on videos for Janet Jackson, George Michael, Busta Rhymes, Wu-Tang Clan,” she explains, “Jennifer Lopez, R. Kelly and Biggie, who was great.”
While in New York, Martin also helped restore one of the city’s landmarks, recreating from scratch a sizeable sculpture of two angels that was originally installed atop Manhattan’s iconic Flatiron building in 1902.