Franklin Martin, Jr., is a beadwork artist always looking to explore the areas where math and art collide.
Growing up in New York with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in his backyard Franklin has always been surrounded by art. His explorations in art took him to drawing and painting, and he has won awards for his acrylic and oil paintings in the pointillism style. He has a great color aesthetic that comes from 28 years in the fashion industry. In 2015 he turned his artistic attention to beads and the development of dimensional beadwork. You will be able to see some of his work published in the upcoming book Contemporary Geometric Beadwork, Volume III.
Franklin leads the US teaching team for the CGB project, and is one of the core members of the Research Team.
Looks
About the look
Fiesta! - Rick Rack Cuff
Beadwork composed of precision glass beads and thread.
2018
Rick-Rack and Zig-Zag pieces are representations of frequencies, and we use them to model everything from music to heartbeats to data. The way that the waveform expresses itself in the geometry of the beads is driven by the size and shape of the individual units, and the stitches used to place them. The resulting fabric of glass is a balance between tension and energy, and the pieces seem to have a life of their own.
Janus Crown - Hyperbolic Paraboloid Crown
Beadwork composed of large scale synthetic beads and thread.
2019
The Warped Squares are known to mathematicians as Hyperbolic Paraboloids, and they are energetic saddle forms that come easily to our beads. Beaded Hypars made in this way (peyote stitch with Herringbone increases) behave the same way as the origami versions, except the folds are generated through stitch placement as opposed to folds placed in the fabric. Chained together like this they form a cycling linkage that can display a variety of faces based on the placement of information in each quadrant of each Hypar. These forms have overlap with both the materials science and communication science teams that CGB is working with to design morphing surfaces.
The alternate image shows the same piece, showing a different face.
Talon - Captured Wave Form
Beadwork composed of precision glass beads, crystals, pearls and thread.
2019
For Talon, I have used a wave form captured in place by crystals to evoke the claws of a dragon. The dragons talons grip beautiful fresh water laser cut pearls. The zig-zag of the waveform gives this necklace an open and airy feel and still the neckpiece is a powerful statement piece.
