A view of the San Francisco Bay Area on a bright, sunny day. Fred Martin was born and raised in the Oakland-East Bay area, where he continues to live and work. In the late 1950s Martin began doing oil paintings in small formats, rejecting the popular oversized canvases that many Bay Area Modernists were drawn to at the time. Some of these Abstract Expressionist paintings, images of the Bay Area in miniature, were hung at The Six Gallery along with his sculptures when Allen Ginsberg read his groundbreaking Beat Generation anthem, "Howl" there.
This could be one of several hilly landscapes in the Bay, perhaps viewed from Fort Point beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, its crowded architecture spilling into a shallow beach foreground. The turquoise sky sports a cluster of fog drifts that will soon dissipate beneath the bright sun.