Biography
Martha Braun is an American artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, whose practice combines abstract painting and contemporary woodblock printmaking. She holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in Architectural Interior Design and in Art. The first two-thirds of her career were built in interior design rather than in fine art: she worked as an interior designer in San Francisco for approximately twenty-five years, including running her own design firm, and was named to Who's Who in Interior Design in 1988 with a parallel professional membership in the American Society of Interior Designers. In 2000 she retired from the design practice and relocated from California to Santa Fe, where she began painting full-time and pursued sustained study under an established New Mexico abstract painter; she has subsequently taught art classes in Arizona for five years. Her painting work draws explicitly on the abstract expressionists Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, and is most closely shaped by Richard Diebenkorn, particularly his California Ocean Park paintings and his later New Mexico work, with their flat colour-field architecture and slow internal warping of the picture surface. Her studio method works primarily in mixed media and acrylic on canvas and board, with layered paint, glazes and handmade papers, and that combination of materials supplies the bridge from her painting into the work selected for the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference juried international exhibition in Echizen. The print Time Passes Slowly in the Desert was included in IMC2024 as a sōsaku-hanga monoprint on Echizen and machine-made washi, in a 19.5 by 38 centimetre format — a thin, horizontal proportion consistent with desert-landscape register, and one that registers her painting interest in flat colour bands and slow internal warping translated into a self-carved, self-printed woodblock idiom. The classification of the print as sōsaku-hanga monoprint rather than as edition mokuhanga is important: the entry signals a unique single impression in the self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed mode of sōsaku-hanga rather than a multiple printed in an edition, which places her IMC2024 work formally inside the creative-print descent of the medium rather than inside the workshop-published shin-hanga tradition. Her exhibition record includes a 2021 feature at Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, a 2015-2016 University of Arizona Museum of Art exhibition, and a series of solo and group shows from 2003-2013; her work is held in private collections across the United States. She is best characterized as a senior West Coast abstract painter whose late-career turn to printmaking has been validated through the principal international juried venue for the medium, and whose desert-landscape register sits inside the colour-field painting tradition rather than inside the kachō-e descent that more typically supplies subject matter for mokuhanga.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇺🇸United States
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Martha Braun is an American artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, whose practice combines abstract painting and contemporary woodblock printmaking. She holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in Architectural Interior Design and in Art. The first two-thirds of her career were built in interior design rather than in fine art: she worked as an interior designer in San Francisco for approximately twenty-five years, including running her own design firm, and was named to Who's Who in Interior Design in 1988 with a parallel professional membership in the American Society of Interior Designers. In 2000 she retired from the design practice and relocated from California to Santa Fe, where she began painting full-time and pursued sustained study under an established New Mexico abstract painter; she has subsequently taught art classes in Arizona for five years. Her painting work draws explicitly on the abstract expressionists Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, and is most closely shaped by Richard Diebenkorn, particularly his California Ocean Park paintings and his later New Mexico work, with their flat colour-field architecture and slow internal warping of the picture surface. Her studio method works primarily in mixed media and acrylic on canvas and board, with layered paint, glazes and handmade papers, and that combination of materials supplies the bridge from her painting into the work selected for the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference juried international exhibition in Echizen. The print Time Passes Slowly in the Desert was included in IMC2024 as a sōsaku-hanga monoprint on Echizen and machine-made washi, in a 19.5 by 38 centimetre format — a thin, horizontal proportion consistent with desert-landscape register, and one that registers her painting interest in flat colour bands and slow internal warping translated into a self-carved, self-printed woodblock idiom. The classification of the print as sōsaku-hanga monoprint rather than as edition mokuhanga is important: the entry signals a unique single impression in the self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed mode of sōsaku-hanga rather than a multiple printed in an edition, which places her IMC2024 work formally inside the creative-print descent of the medium rather than inside the workshop-published shin-hanga tradition. Her exhibition record includes a 2021 feature at Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, a 2015-2016 University of Arizona Museum of Art exhibition, and a series of solo and group shows from 2003-2013; her work is held in private collections across the United States. She is best characterized as a senior West Coast abstract painter whose late-career turn to printmaking has been validated through the principal international juried venue for the medium, and whose desert-landscape register sits inside the colour-field painting tradition rather than inside the kachō-e descent that more typically supplies subject matter for mokuhanga.
Martha Braun's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.
Martha Braun is a contemporary printmaker working in the mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock) tradition. Their work contributes to the living tradition of Japanese woodblock printing. Prices for contemporary mokuhanga prints range from $100 for smaller works to $1,500 for major compositions. Most prints sell in the $180–$600 range. The global mokuhanga community has been growing, with increasing exhibition opportunities and collector interest. Contemporary mokuhanga represents an affordable entry point for collectors.