Cascade, 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 36x40 inches.

Inspired by nature and the desire to create “Super-Real” effects in her paintings, Susan Martin has made flora — and the flora of Florida, in particular — her subject matter for decades. Painting as if through the lens of a macroscopic camera (she trained under renowned photographer Russell Lee), Martin renders astonishingly detailed and crisp images of the natural world around her. Not quite a landscape painter — her views zoom in so closely that the entire composition is occupied by petals and leaves — Martin takes the tradition of landscape, with all of its awe-inducing qualities, and makes it her own.

Based out of Merritt Island, Florida, Martin caters in sharp edges and contrastive colors, deploying acrylic for its flexibility and ability to dry quickly, granting her the degree of control she seeks to produce work that examines plant-life in hyper-real ways the human eye alone cannot. Indeed, viewers are invited to admire not merely the beauty of the natural world but also the intricacy of Martin’s technique. Hovering somewhere between realism and photorealism and ethereality and science, the works in Efflorescence transcend easy categorization; Martin homes in literally on the simple subject of plant life and asks us to reconsider the ways we, too, see, or perhaps take for granted, our familiar environments.