Meet Aaron Martin of East Nashville

Today we’d like to introduce you to Aaron Martin

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Howdy. My name is Aaron Martin and I was born on July 11, 1989 in Richmond, Virginia at 11:41 PM, this is for the people who are into astrology. My family moved to Concord, North Carolina when I was four so that my father could be plant manager of the Phillip Morris facility which was located there. My father wasn’t a smoker and he actually hated them. So, when I was about four years old, we moved to Monterey, Tennessee where my family is from. I grew up in the country, nestled up in a unique nugget of high elevation on the Cumberland Plateau . I was never an artist growing up though I would doodle while I ignored my teachers. My father got sick with cancer when I was at the age of 19. I realized that nothing I had been doing was actually what I wanted to do and for whatever reason artwork was the pathway that popped into my head. He died and then in February 2011 I moved to Nashville Tennessee. I chose Nashville because they had an art school there and it wasn’t too far from my mother and the rest of my family. I spoke to my father before he died and told him that if he wasn’t going to see anything proper for me, a family or a wife (things that he was really into), that he should at least see me go towards my path and, like I said, artwork was the way. I had always been used to a large group of people around me. My friend group was very big growing up and I would hang out with anywhere from 40 to 100 kids every night. We were hellions and when I got to Nashville I felt that I still needed that energy around me. Therefore, when I got to town I started reaching out to bands that I enjoyed, and I would say to them, “ Hey there. I’m Aaron. You don’t know me. I love what you do. I think you’re cool. I made some artwork for you. You never hired me, but I thought it was nice to do. If you like this you can use it no problem, but you have to play a show for me when I need you to.” This built a scene around me instead of requiring me to locate one and slowly chip into it, and I quickly met enough people to become somewhat of a staple in the teensy weensy art community at the time. I spent my time throwing parties with friends. I made them free and local and national acts would play, and the swirl of music was always there. Because of my proximity to music, I was always familiar with it and bands would often ask me to kick it after I had done artwork for them. After a few years of this, I was invited to play in a band called Sol Cat, which I thought was dumb, but I always accept projects if I think I’m capable of them . Years later that diffused I created my own project called Okey Dokey with a few buddies of mine, and the combination of knowledge and art knowledge were supremely useful to me as I never had to stress to be connected to an energetic scene. In the years that I’ve been working as an artist, 14 or so now , I’ve provided artwork for hundreds of bands, fans, hundreds of posters, multiple festivals, I’ve done animations, I’ve done consulting with businesses from breweries to Italian restaurants, and in the last year I have completed the first book I’ve ever done titled SUPERDEEP, which is also the largest offering that I’ve ever put together of my own art I love what I do and I really love what The Universe has handed me. If I wasn’t a werewolf living in the city I’d have archived it better, but I don’t nature speaks that way unless we’re talking about rocks and bones.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I for one don’t consider peace a placid lake, and I think that real peace is what happens when little kids throw rocks into the water. It’s not so much that things are always so smooth. It’s that life gives you opportunities to create ripples and that is the most enjoyable part. That is the peaceful part. I think the more difficult feature of my particular journey was that I found myself off of the back of my father‘s death. So, in that phase of my life, it was hard to regulate my energy between identifying and realizing my potential and trying to shed the heaviness of losing 1/2 of my parental identity . As far as everything else goes, I have obviously experienced many things from, you know, relationship dramas, deaths, injuries, fights; all kinds of things that come to a person who has a full love for experience. I think one of the challenges was that music, unlike art, has more people that swarm around it and for that reason I had to challenge my spirit to maintain itself while a new form of creativity entered my realm. I have never seen myself as a musician really, because I didn’t spend my whole life wanting to do that, but it is the same thing as drawing a picture or designing some mechanical object. Everything is consciousness incarnate and there should always be some kind of challenge to that. You are literally giving birth. I find myself constantly amazed and delighted by the way that synchronicity has given me peace. I used to see myself as a chaos engine because of the way that life can be so unforeseen. However, now that I’ve witnessed myself in this environment for so many years, I see myself more like the ginkgo leaf, that little seed pod thing that swirls and swirls all the way down until finding its ultimate resting place on the ground. That kind of chaos is so beautiful and I would never leave that.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I think the major theme of my art, whether it’s murals, or digital, or pen and ink is that it formed from a chaotic event. I gravitated towards pen and ink after my father died because life is so random and so our mistakes, but you can control your reaction to those things and that was all I wanted to be capable of doing well. When you do that kind of artwork sometimes you spill things or whatever and your only opportunity is to fix them with more of that same black that you started with. I used to draw at coffee shops, knowing that someone might bump my table and ruin the work of the day, but that was the chance that I wanted to utilize to get better at what I did. When I got into murals I was nervous and unsure of what to do and then I realized that if I could only make my pin tip bigger I would be able to paint walls. So that’s what I did. When it comes to working for musicians or any other corporeal representation of that type, which is what a business is as well, I just accepted the things that people would naturally and organically ask me to do. If I could envision myself pulling it off, good or bad, I would accept it and therefore I was able to do what artists are really meant to do and all the work is there for. I was able to find my style, my voice, and that is what we are here to do as artists. I can translate any thought that I’ve ever had or anything I’ve ever seen into my style and it looks like me and that is what we’re supposed to be doing. That is what I’m all about.

How do you define success?
Success truly is being happy and that is all I care about and there are millions of ways to get there, but not a single one of them includes selling your soul in the name of success. I would leave anything I’ve ever mastered behind in order to have real success, real inner peace. Happiness is the only thing that one should focus on.

Pricing:

• Murals $4,000+
• Digital $650+
• Paintings $850+
• Consulting $75/hr
• Pen and Ink. Always based on how I feel about them. I tend to give them away to the right person.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @smilelikethewindboy
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aaron.martin.1460693?mibextid=LQQJ4d