Martha's Story

Sometimes things have to get bad before they get great.

Let’s look back 15 years, to economically depressed Portland, Oregon. Martha felt trapped in an administrative job, helping manage a wealthy athletic club’s brutalist building. For many years she had been longing to find a way to make the pictures in her head into a way to pay the bills and was feeling far from this ever happening.

A stroke of fate sent Martha to the SBDC, where she met a maker selling his art at Portland Saturday Market. With a borrowed tent and a new style (gift from the muse) blending hand-lettered words and pictures, she learned to sell her art from a pop-up booth. This "cute and deadly" style became her signature, creating personal yet relatable paintings.

The secret? Humor, painting skills, an unstoppable imagination, a refusal to return to a day job, and a keen understanding of life’s challenges.