Fred Martin (1927-2022) was a driving force of the Post-War California art scene. Having studied alongside Jay De Feo and Sam Francis, his mentors also included David Park, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko. His legacy would be forged as a longtime professor and administrator at the SFAI, where students included abstract artists like Deborah Remington. His work was on view during Allen Ginsberg’s famed Six Gallery Reading of Howl in 1955, and he would also show several times at the esteemed Dilexi Gallery in the early-1960s.

When Martin began painting in the late 1940s, he used oil paint or house paint to create semi-abstracted scenes based on real and imagined imagery. At times these works ventured into action painting; other works, however, were created with a Chinese sumi brush, and focused more on calligraphic brushstrokes as figures and objects developed among various textures. Writing on Martin's work in a 1973 SFMoMA catalog, curator Suzanne Foley notes that his artistic style developed as he was studying with David Park, who emphasized "compositional simplicity", while also receiving "the greatest direction" from the "beat ambiance" of the time, which spoke to "Fred Martin's sensitivity.”

Martin's work reflects his broad and diverse range of interests, including Jungian psychology. Over the years, much of his art has contained autobiographical details often in the form of symbols or anthropomorphic imagery. Poppies, for example, represent his first wife, Jean, who was also an artist, while grain, seeds, and phallic symbols allude to regeneration.