Arts Magazine, New York
April 1960
These paintings have a certain wild flair, a freedom of manner that us not quite abstract nor, in any confirmed way, representational, and an extravagance of rich color. Occasionally there are reminisces of Roualt and the Expressionists, but these do not point up any consistent influence.
What one does feel the lack of most noticeably is a sense of control- the kind of control that one does find in Figures in a Landscape, for instance, where the energies of the paintings are tied down to something concrete. There the vigor of the technique is measured by the uses to which it is put.
Arts Magazine, New York
March 1961
An excitement about materials and technique characterizes these chalk and ink drawings, watercolors and oils. This is partly attributable to DeMartis’ experience as a restorer. Although he has managed on the whole to keep his technique “at bay”, his interest in textural variety may have prevented him from achieving consistency.
While some are nonobjective, many of the pictures concern architectural and landscape themes, but he is best in both forms when working on a larger scale.
In one abstraction, a group of flower-like red, blue, purple and white forms cluster in the center of the gray paper, and is overlaid by black shapes that resemble Arabic script. Another work is based on a colonnaded building, in which the shapes are lightly suggested in watercolor, and flickers of white dusted with pink chalk. (Hicks St. Gallery Mar. 12-31)
Brooklyn World-Telegram, New York
May 17, 1965
It’s a silent world that James DeMartis works in, but it’s a free one and it’s his own.
DeMartis spends most of the day alone in a third floor room. There is little sound to interrupt his labors except the noise of traffic below and the occasional ring of the phone.
Sometimes the need to see other human beings overcomes him, and he walks to the window to enjoy the crowded, active scene down on the sidewalk. But he soon goes back to the easel.
DeMartis is a painter and a successful one.
He has had several one-man shows in New York and in Europe and his paintings now hang in some of the larger private collections. His ability and reputation have grown large enough for him to earn his living by his skill with a brush.
The freedom and independence of this life give great satisfaction to DeMartis, a tall, solidly-built ex-merchant seaman who has never fitted into the nine-to-five slot, or the beatnik slot, or any slot at all.
He is simply an artist, a man whose inner well-being depends on his private vision of the world and his success or failure in getting it on canvas, not on his ability to please an employer, or the approval of the president of the PTA.
Not that DeMartis is a rebel; he is too much his own man to bother with that. Though he has painted “as long as I can remember.” He never deliberately planned on a career as an artist.
“It just happened naturally,” he said. “It’s a good life; free, independent, without the restrictions that many people get trapped into.”
DeMartis is originally from Queens. After high school he went into the Army and served the last two years of World War II in Belgium and Germany.
After that, he wandered, supporting himself at one odd job after another. He studied art in New York, shipped out with the Merchant Marine for a while, came back and bummed around the California beach, then went up to Alaska to see what things were like there.
He never stopped painting or drawing, however. Even aboard ship as an oiler in the engine room, he found time to sketch.
Then came five years of art study in Italy and France on the G.I. Bill of Rights. He met his wife, Silvana, in Italy, and his children, Stephen and Barbara were born there.
He returned in 1956, lived in Queens a year, and then moved into his present home at 162 Montague St., Brooklyn Heights.
His studio is in Manhattan, above the 2nd floor Armory Gallery at 38 Lexington Ave., near the corner of E. 24th St.
The walls of the studio are covered with paintings; the floor stacked with them. “ I know it’s jammed, but I like it that way. Some people can’t stand it. My wife keeps telling me she’s going to come over one day and clean it up.”
DeMartis also earns some money restoring old paintings. He is curator of paintings for the Long Island Historical Society.
An exhibit of his recent works opens at 5 this afternoon in the Armory Gallery. It will continue through June 3.
The gallery began three years ago as a cooperative enterprise by DeMartis and several other painters. “But they’ve all gone their separate ways and I’m the only one left.”
He does not expect to be able to keep the Armory going by himself. This will be its last show. He hopes to join a gallery uptown.
He doesn’t appear disturbed by the idea of being “between galleries” for a while. Things always seem to work out for DeMartis, or he thinks they do, which may be the same thing.
When the doctor’s or dentist’s bills pile up and the bank account is low, it often happens that a painting is happily accepted in place of money.
“An artist sometimes must use his work as ‘wampum,’” DeMartis said. He recently traded a painting for a used car, for instance.
Last year he was able to buy the summer home by the sea he has always wanted. He “just happened” on an eight-room house in Stonington, Maine, priced at $1500.
Artspeak Bi-weekly Gallery review
May 27, 1982
Showing at the Brownstone Gallery, 76 7th Ave. in Brooklyn until June 5, is one of those who seems to be doing landscapes and a few still lifes in a partly abstract vein- nothing eventful, nothing daring. This is not an unexplored area of art, but it is that of an artist who is at one with nature. His own nature is contemplative, with nature. His own nature is contemplative, so Mr. DeMartis must follow where that leads him, One must appreciate such honesty.
Contemplation describes work that is not necessarily simply calm, for the longer one examines these many small to medium paintings on paper or canvas, the more one sees movement and color linked with emotion. On the scale of excitement, in fact, theseworks are above average. At first glance, the paintings are so well self-contained that they seem calm, but one’s eye soon moves about faster and faster, observing more and more pleasures, pursuing the perspectives, the contrasts of colors. This is a mature and skilled artist who grows as one looks and compares.
The titles indicate that there is an intellectual aspect to such contemplation- referring to Blake, Zen and fantasy. The frame within a frame aspect of many works not only adds to a three-dimensionality of a scene, but refers to mystical heightening of reality, as in “Purple Flowers”, reproduced here.