I came across this artist quite by accident while beginning some mild research on another.
The first video (just under 6 minutes long) puts in a nutshell much of Eddie Owens Martin's story.
Here's the man himself:
More photographs at Google Image, HERE
.
From Georgia Encyclopedia.com: where I gathered Martin's date of birth:
A 12 noon chart for 4 July 1908, Buena Vista, Georgia.
Wow! Lots of Cancerian input: a stellium (cluster) Sun, Mercury, Neptune, Venus conjoined, and Mars all in Cancer. Self, communication style, creativity, imagination, drive and artistry all have the sensitivity and home-loving (here home-enhancing) style of Cancer. This artist was all about home! Natal Sun and Mercury conjunct Neptune clearly reflect what he saw as his visionary nature.
There's a T-square formation involving an opposition from Uranus (eccentricity), and challenging squares from Uranus to Saturn and Uranus to the Cancer stellium. Though eccentric Uranus is in practical Capricorn it's in challenging aspect to practical and limiting Saturn, as well as to that stellium in Cancer. I'll translate that, as regards his art, as representing the artist's gravitation to putting his eccentric artistry on a grounded, practical background.
Martin's Moon would have been somewhere in Virgo, quite likely in helpful sextile to one or more of his Cancer planets - a second indication - this time via his inner self, anchoring his potentially wilder Neptunian imagination, bringing it down to earth.
The first video (just under 6 minutes long) puts in a nutshell much of Eddie Owens Martin's story.
Here's the man himself:
More photographs at Google Image, HERE
.
From Georgia Encyclopedia.com: where I gathered Martin's date of birth:
Eddie Owens Martin
Self-taught artist and Georgia native St. EOM established the visionary art site Pasaquan in the mid-1950s. Located in Marion County, Pasaquan is maintained and operated today by Columbus State University, which assumed control of the site in 2016.
St. EOM was born Eddie Owens Martin on July 4, 1908, in Marion County to Lydia Pearl and Julius Roe Martin, a sharecropper. In 1922, seeking to escape the rural life of his parents, he left home and ultimately moved to New York City, where he began to study art in the city's museums and libraries.
After living in New York for about a decade, Martin had a series of visions while suffering from a high fever. In his visions, three "people of the future" from a place called Pasaquan selected him to depict, through art, a peaceful future for human beings. After receiving these visions, Martin began to call himself St. EOM.
A 12 noon chart for 4 July 1908, Buena Vista, Georgia.
Wow! Lots of Cancerian input: a stellium (cluster) Sun, Mercury, Neptune, Venus conjoined, and Mars all in Cancer. Self, communication style, creativity, imagination, drive and artistry all have the sensitivity and home-loving (here home-enhancing) style of Cancer. This artist was all about home! Natal Sun and Mercury conjunct Neptune clearly reflect what he saw as his visionary nature.
There's a T-square formation involving an opposition from Uranus (eccentricity), and challenging squares from Uranus to Saturn and Uranus to the Cancer stellium. Though eccentric Uranus is in practical Capricorn it's in challenging aspect to practical and limiting Saturn, as well as to that stellium in Cancer. I'll translate that, as regards his art, as representing the artist's gravitation to putting his eccentric artistry on a grounded, practical background.
Martin's Moon would have been somewhere in Virgo, quite likely in helpful sextile to one or more of his Cancer planets - a second indication - this time via his inner self, anchoring his potentially wilder Neptunian imagination, bringing it down to earth.
Quite the guy, that St EOM! There were a number of individuals that were on the fringes of acceptable normal born around that time, displaying their unique qualities from the 1930s onward, but I suppose every generation has their fringe.
ReplyDeleteHis Pluto rose before the Sun and was leader of the pack to his Cancer stellium. The excerpt you provide from Georgia Encyclopedia states that he left home for New York in 1922...he would have been about 14 or 15 at that time! Around the age of 15, transiting Pluto was conjunct his natal Sun, then year-by-year, was conjunct the others in that vicinity. About the age of 18 was transiting Pluto conjunct natal Neptune and opposed natal Uranus.
His fever, about ten years after 1922...in 1932-1933, he had transiting Uranus in Aries, transiting Pluto in Cancer, both around 23*...then in late 1933 into 1934, he had transiting Jupiter in T-square, with the T-square hitting his natal Mars (heat, fever).
He must have been psychically inclined, as the Wiki for Pasaquan states, "Martin inherited the land from his mother and, using proceeds earned from fortune telling, transformed the house and its surrounding land."
An interesting detail...the T-square that I mentioned above occurring 1932-1933, is like our current transiting Jupiter-Uranus-Pluto T-square, but with Pluto in Capricorn (it was in Cancer back then).
ReplyDeletemike ~ Years of constant transiting Pluto! No wonder he was a tad eccentric!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the additional astrological detail.
He was one of the Pluto in Gemini generation, natally. I've often thought that generation brought forth some extraordinary talents, in writing, art - everything.
Martin's talent - the art itself isn't THAT extraordinary, but as an individual, he was, himself extraordinary, but in the end shot himself in the head - so sad!
Here's a paragraph from another piece about him:
Eccentric, idiosyncratic, obsessive, quixotic, megalomaniacal, outrageous—St. EOM was all these things. He was one of the Great American Characters, a unique variation on the archetypal mad recluse so often portrayed in Southern literature. But even if Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams had ingested big doses of the hallucinogenic psilocybe mushrooms which thrive in south Georgia’s cow pastures, and collaborated on a work of post-modern Gothic fiction, they still couldn’t have invented someone like him.
http://bombmagazine.org/article/902/st-eom