Martha Music takes up Intentional Creativity Painting
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Abstract – Martha Music – Folk & Illustrations
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Abstract
Covid 19 A. Largo Assai
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Covid 19 B. Prestezza
(Juror’s Merit Award, KAA Colors of Autumn Virtual Show 10/2020)
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Covid 19 C. Freddo
(People’s Choice Award KAA Winter Showcase 2/2020)
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Covid 19 D. Smorzando
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Stars and Stripes
(Second Place Celebrate America KAA Showcase 8/2021)
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My Pfizer Booster
(2nd Place in December 2021 KAA Showcase)
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Torquoise
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Martha Music
Sakura Violin
(Third Place KAA Member Showcase 8/21 and Reading Colors Your World Art Contest Top 5 Finalist 8/21)
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Vivaldi Autumn
(Third Place KAA Fall Showcase 2021)
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Vivaldi Summer (Second Place KAA Members Showcase #3 2021)
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Fiddle Swarm
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Doodle Violin
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Folk & Illustrations
Vitality
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Children’s Book Lillebet And Her Violin
A. Violin Garden
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B. Germany Adventure/Music the International Language
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C. Clear and Sweet
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Cattitude
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To purchase prints, cards, originals contact Martha at mh.hughes8@gmail.com
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Artists Statement:
One of 8 children, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area graduating with a Performance/ Pedagogy Degree ( Violin and Viola) and Masters Degree. After living in Japan during my college years and attending Sophia University and ASU, I also picked up a degree in Asian Studies. I was not prepared for my ‘real’ career – Mother to my autistic son, and caregiver for my husband when fate significantly struck him down in 2011. Nearly burnt out by 2016, I managed to find a good counselor and after several years of therapy I am happy to report that I consider myself a “ Caregiver in Recovery”. Painting, having started up in the past two years via an Intentional Creativity Painting class on Meetup.com by my sister Jan Jorgensen, has become an important tool for me to express my emotional turmoil; to resolve it, dissolve it, destroy it, lift it up to our creator to filter and recycle it…. I often splash and lash out at the canvas with anger and frustration. I have no formal training or techniques, just the sheer will power and perseverance to express myself and heal. Peace, gratitude and joy are what I now try to focus on daily.
Recent Musical Awards, Senior Division:
2nd place in the 2021 Oregon State Fiddle Contest,
3rd place in the 2020 Tennessee National Fiddle Contest
Art as Healer for the Care-Giver
After a long successful career as strings specialist, educator, conductor Martha semi-retired in Oregon. She picked up the paints brush and began the Intentional Creativity method of painting to augment her gardening, music and love of family and getting together with her sisters. When Covid hit, she took to the easel with her sister Jan Jorgensen, a certified Intentional Creativity Instructor and who knew she would be featured in two art exhibits the first year! The method supported her in maintaining her inner balance during the Covid lockdown and she also is a care-giver for a disabled husband and she facilitates care for her son with Asperger’s. Art has found a home with Martha and her easel is her muse, therapist, and holds her feelings with no excuses, permission from others and it asks nothing of her. She plays the colors generated by feelings so musically and the results are a holograph of HER. Forgiving, kind, un-conditional and beautiful and sometimes starkly honest and darkly contained. Art sustains life, contains it and allows it to flow onward. Art is Healing. Contact Martha at: MH.Hughes@gmail.com
A note from Jan, Martha’s sister and Painting instructor:
Painting becomes the Healer for the Caregiver
My younger sister was blissfully gifted with an ability to play music. Heavenly music that led to mastery on the violin in her teens. They say you have to “hear” the note and then match it when you put your hands onto the strings and bow and she had the exact gift of matching those heavenly tones. Over the years her gift expanded to the harp, guitar, and a Master’s degree in Music, but her greatest gift is the one she offers to the thousands of young people she has brought her teaching skills to. Martha Music I called her as a child growing up in a home where the screeching bowing finally settled into a world-class vibrato shared in a popular Japanese band, as the conductor of the Phoenix Symphony Guild Youth String Orchestra and founder of the renown Gilbert Town Fiddlers. Semi-retired and tired in so many ways she settled into her life in Oregon in her early 60’s teaching in the Public Schools system as a substitute teacher. Quite a change from her full-time public education duties and caring for a husband with a disability, and juggling the demands of raising a son with Asperger’s. She did it all. It was now time for her. To plant that garden. To then master the fiddle music, winning 2nd place in the Old Time Oregon Fiddlers Assoc National contest, 3rd in the Tennessee National. She so loved the Soul Painting I created for her she ordered umbrellas with her image and gifted her students with the Martha Music rain protection! So many ways to explore life anew. Quilt!
My sister Martha and I
When the pandemic hit the outings to nurseries, visits with her nearby sisters ceased. Life contracted. We all felt the sadness. I invited her into my Intentional Creativity Painting, developed by Shiloh Sophia, sessions on zoom where we paint from a theme 3 hours monthly. And there, Martha picked up the brush and spread the frequencies of disappointment, anger, and injustice across a canvas willing to hold her emotional colors. Martha played the paintbrush to her canvas like an instrument…precise, providing context, color and swaths of hues and themes that unlashed the grief and distress her soul carried. The stark black felt pen contrasted and contained, and splattered the Chopin-like energies across the field as her Covid world closed in. Wiping down foods delivered, masking up, and the drone of television all day long for a sensitive Martha Music….laying down music as color on the canvas made the unbearable doable. She mused, she paused, she painted. She clicked on the zoom room and opened her heart to the structure and safety of the Intentional Creativity method to stream the pressure from her chest out into melodies wondrous colors, forms and images. She painted violins, of course, cats, music, flowers, beautiful faces with swirling music, over and over and over. Until she didn’t. Those gave way to the black boxes with silver luminous outlines like a 
replicating heartless virus. Stark, intense and repeated. Just like her feelings. I witnessed the progressive release, the and therapeutic nature of the method through her as well as the visionary, almost prophetic revealings as well. As a child her intuitive empathic abilities were profoundly exhibited and my mother knowingly provided the container of music for Martha as we fondly would say “her feet are planted firmly I the clouds”
Our family of 8 siblings have an outstanding characteristic to adapt. ART is at the core of that resilience. To lift, disassemble the harsher dense realities of modern living are softened by the expressive beauty found in music, and now painting for my sweet sensitive little sister Martha. She is courageous, beautiful, humble and now, an Artist with two showings under her belt. She has displayed her work at the Keizer Art Association on-line shows and was then chose to be a featured artist for a “Care Givers” art exhibit at the Salem Hospital. Bright lights for soft spoken Martha. The talented, exquisitely gifted Martha. She has mastered the Intentional Creativity process and is a mama cat protecting her easel, time to paint and intrinsically she knows the role this painting has played for her mental health these last two years. The pieces chronicle her inner journey. This method of painting is phenomenally healing.
Lifting her up, a place to pour out, and fill up. A sacred container just for HER. And now the world sees her too. I just can’t imagine a more wonderful thing. A woman carrying so much, dancing through it all with her fiddle and paint brush. Jan Jorgensen RN, PHN, CMP, MA
Martha Music Soul Portrait by Jan Jorgensen