My name is John Martini, I'm a sculptor and printmaker.

I've been in Key West since 1976.

I've been working in this studio since about 1983.

There's a really tight community, people are really supportive.

When I first got here, there was two galleries and there was an influx of hippies and gay, big, big gay input at that time.

And that kind of began to rebuild Key West in a in a really nice way, with lots of small business, locally owned businesses.

When AIDS hit, we were hit really, really hard.

The arts community and especially.

We lost so many, so many, so many good artists, and they've never really recovered from that.

And my process is pretty industrial.

It's a lot of heavy lifting and moving and when I first started, I worked with Scrap that I found around Key West.

And I would try to work intuitively.

So I would come in, try to come into the studio blank, and look at a piece and then see what I saw or what it kind of fed to me.

I fed off of the material, and I was very direct.

I'd do a drawing real quick, a real fast drawing, which I love to do, and then I would just cut it out with a torch.

Now the works are a little bit more engineered, so I work pretty much from sketchbooks.

So again, I try to come into my sketchbook.

It's more or less blank.

I mean, a lot of my work, I'd been spending a lot of time in museums and doing a lot of sketches in museums, and that was really my art's education.

So now, I think that through those processes, I've evolved into my own kind of little alley where I am.

And my work has become a conglomeration of everything that I've experienced before.

And hopefully it's changing in time.

Although it maintains its same sort of kind of manner and form.

The work is sort of not traditionally dimensional, in terms of sculpture, but I feel like the color and the edges create a sense of volume and also a sense of kind of timelessness.

I try to make the work look like you can't place it in time, that it's been there or it was there before, it'll be thereafter.

And also I've gotten to make prints, which I love to do.

And it's always monoprints, and it's very, very immediate process and it finishes.

I was never much of a painter 'cause I was always full of regrets.

So monoprint is finished and it's a surprise.

You pull the print off the press, and you have what you have, and you're really not sure what you're gonna get.

And it's real, real immediate and it's real fast, as opposed to, you know... My work now is pretty much done when the sketch is decided upon.

You know, I just kind of scale it up and there's not much change in the pieces, in the process.

Any changes are done in the sketches.

So the monoprints are really direct, which is what I would prefer.

I mean, which I really...

Gives me pleasure as it were, you know, to pull something from wherever it comes from, I don't know.

I'm not a particularly ambitious or driven.

I've given up that, you know.

You realize that you think that things are gonna change your life, you know, you get a show in Paris or in New York, or something that somehow your life is gonna be all different, but nothing ever change, you know, I mean it doesn't really change, you just continue on.

I'm very lucky I've been able to continue to work and support myself, which is an amazing, amazing really.

Once you're actually working, then it's coming.

You know, the next thing's appearing.