There are images in Marty Treinen’s Out of My Darkness—Into Our Light that I hate. I do not dislike them because they are unsuccessful. I hate them because they work. They take me somewhere I have already been and do not particularly want to visit again. They remind me of people I have loved, things I have lost, moments I could not stop, and experiences I would gladly leave buried if Marty’s images did not insist that I look at them again.

Then there are other images in this body of work that I would gladly live with every day of my life. They show tenderness, companionship, trust, protection, intimacy, friendship, dignity and that extraordinarily ordinary human act of simply being there for another person. After nearly thirty years of knowing Marty Treinen as my partner, friend and fellow artist, I finally understand what connects all of these images. The subject is not darkness. It is not even survival. The subject is love.

That may sound deceptively simple. Love is one of those words we have used so often that we have almost worn it smooth. We love our husbands and wives, our families and friends, our dogs, our hometowns, our favorite restaurants and a good pair of shoes. We say the same word for experiences that could not possibly carry the same weight. Somewhere in all that repetition, it becomes easy to forget what love actually asks of us.

To love another human being is to make ourselves vulnerable to joy, certainly, but also to grief, fear, disappointment, separation and loss. I do not mean that love requires suffering or that suffering should ever be mistaken for love. I mean something much simpler: once another human being truly matters to us, losing them can hurt. Pain can become the price we pay for having loved someone enough that their presence changed our lives.

The Human Superpower

That is why I have come to think of love as our human superpower. For years, Marty and I have talked about creativity as one of the extraordinary capacities human beings possess. I still believe that. Creativity allows us to imagine what does not yet exist and then bring it into the world. Yet there is something underneath even that impulse.

Why do we create? Why do we build families, communities, works of art, museums, schools, hospitals, books, plays and monuments? Why do we care whether something survives after us? Somewhere beneath so much of what human beings make is the desire to care for something beyond ourselves. Love gives us a reason to act. Creativity gives that action form.

Out of My Darkness—Into Our Light is the result of one artist gradually discovering that truth within his own work. The exhibition, the accompanying talks, and the book planned for release in the spring of 2027 draw together a visual life stretching from Marty’s post-college years in 1983 through 2026. Looking across that span, you begin to understand that this is not simply a collection of individual pictures. It is a record of a human being looking at the people around him for more than four decades and asking, consciously or unconsciously, the same question: What does it mean that this person mattered to me?

Nearly Thirty Years Beside an Artist

I met Marty almost thirty years ago, and we have been together ever since. During those years, I have watched him work in more creative fields than most people would attempt in several lifetimes. He has been an artist, designer, educator, museum professional, builder, project manager, writer, filmmaker, collaborator and entrepreneur. None of those identities ever seemed contradictory to him because he has always understood creativity as an action rather than an occupation. To be creative is to create. The medium changes according to what the idea requires.

At 69, however, Marty has returned with remarkable concentration to the thing he has loved doing above almost everything else: looking at the world immediately in front of him and making it visible to other people. Not the world as he wishes it had been. Not some invented life polished into a more comfortable story. He is looking again at his lived experience—the people he knew, the people he loved, the people he cared for, the people who cared for him, the people who disappointed him, the people who frightened him, and the people whose absence remains present long after they are gone.

The Power of the Portrait

A portrait can do that in a way almost nothing else can. Human beings have been making images of one another for as long as we have been able to leave evidence of ourselves behind. Technologies change. Stone gives way to pigment, drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, film and digital media, but the impulse remains astonishingly familiar: I saw this person. This person existed. Look at them.

Marty removes much of what normally surrounds a figure and tells us how that person should be understood. When he does this, something profound happens. The usual social shorthand surrounding a human being is stripped away. Take away the house, automobile, occupation, possessions, title, uniform, office, and other artifacts we use to announce who someone is supposed to be, and eventually we are left with the person.

What remains is not less of the person, but more the individual. The whole individual stands before us: visible and exposed, vulnerable at one moment and powerful at another. A face, a hand, the position of a body, the distance between two people, an embrace, a gesture of protection or withdrawal—these become the language, moving through the emotional range that makes an individual recognizably human.

Marty asks us to encounter the individual first. It is at that point that the person no longer belongs only to him. They are now ours, brought into our lives with whatever impression they may leave. We will experience what we will, and emotional experience or indifference. The person may remind us of part of our lives, may remain only briefly, or may simply offer us a perspective we do not yet understand

That is the territory Marty understands instinctively. His figures do not need elaborate environments to explain themselves because the body is already speaking. We spend our lives reading one another this way whether we realize it or not. A clenched hand tells us something, and so does a relaxed one. Distance between two bodies tells us something different from an embrace. A turned head can reveal refusal, fear, shame, exhaustion or grief. The smallest shift in posture can change the entire emotional meaning of an image.

Marty has said for years that actions denote intention. Listen to what people say, certainly, but eventually look at what they do. Our bodies often reveal the truth before our words manage to catch up. That belief is fundamental to understanding his figurative work because these pictures depend upon gesture, relationship and physical presence. They ask us to look long enough to notice what is happening between people.

What Iowa Gave Him

Some of the roots of that way of looking go back much further than I do. Marty grew up in Iowa, in a Catholic family, in a Midwestern world that included a small city, extended family and time spent on family farms. Like every childhood, it contained complexities he would understand differently as an adult. Yet what remains important to him is the lesson that caring about another human being is demonstrated through action. Service is something you do. Friendship is something you do. Compassion is something you do. Love becomes meaningful when somebody acts upon it.

I have heard Marty tell stories about Iowa for three decades. Recently, a stranger who had traveled there told him how remarkable it was to encounter so many friendly people. Marty laughed because the observation confirmed something he has carried with him all these years. Whatever else has changed, that is the Iowa he remembers: people acknowledging one another, helping one another and behaving as though the person standing in front of them deserves to be seen.

Long before Out of My Darkness—Into Our Light, another artist had taught Marty something about the extraordinary power of seeing the person directly in front of you. That artist was Mauricio Lasansky.

Mauricio Lasansky and the Figure in Front of You

Marty first encountered Lasansky’s artworks through exhibits at the Art Center in Sioux City. Later, when he went to the University of Iowa on scholarship, he entered an art school profoundly shaped by Lasansky’s presence. The Argentine-born artist joined the University of Iowa faculty in 1945 and became one of the central figures in the development of American printmaking. Iowa credits Lasansky with founding its innovative printmaking program, which offered the first MFA in printmaking in the United States and helped establish printmaking as a serious independent artistic discipline within American universities.

Technique mattered enormously to Lasansky. His intaglio prints could combine engraving, etching, aquatint, soft ground, drypoint and multiple plates in images of considerable scale and complexity. Yet all that technical mastery would mean very little if there were nothing human underneath it. One of the works that remained with Marty was Thomas from 1962, a large five-plate intaglio portrait of Mauricio Lasansky’s youngest son. Years later, while studying at the University of Iowa, Marty would actually meet Thomas in the print studio. That made these portraits something more than images of anonymous subjects from another artist’s life. These were Lasansky’s family, friends and the people immediately around him—the people he knew and loved.

That distinction mattersbecause an artist does not always have to travel to another continent or invent an exotic subject to find something worth saying. Sometimes the great subject is sitting across the table. Sometimes it is sleeping beside you. Sometimes it is your mother, your son, your friend, your neighbor or the person whose hand you are holding because neither of you knows what else to do.

The University of Iowa gave Marty the formal foundations of drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, ceramics and design. Those disciplines taught him how to make things. Lasansky’s example helped reinforce another lesson: technique ultimately exists in service to what the artist has to say. Master the tools so completely that you are free to use whichever ones the idea demands. Then find something worth saying.

Looking at the Darkness

Lasansky also showed us a darker side to life.  That darkness is important to understanding Marty’s work. Alongside intimate portraits of family and people within his world, Lasansky created The Nazi Drawings, a monumental series of 33 works confronting the atrocities of Nazi Germany. The works were developed principally during the 1960s and exhibited in 1967 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and later that spring at the Whitney Museum of American Art. They are not easy images, nor were they intended to be. Today the National Gallery of Art identifies the complete body as a series of 33 drawings.

I personally never experienced The Nazi Drawings in person. I have encountered them through reproductions in a book Marty owns.  I personally find them horrifying and almost impossible to look at. They are not images I would choose to hang in our home. Their power does not depend upon whether I want to live with them. Their power lies partly in the fact that I do not.

That realization helped me understand my reaction to Out of My Darkness—Into Our Light. Some of Marty’s images make me profoundly uncomfortable because I know too much about them. I know what sits outside the frame. I know some of the people. I know the experiences that gave certain images their emotional weight. During our years together, I have watched Marty carry memories that do not conveniently divide themselves into happiness and sorrow. Real life rarely has that courtesy.

Those images take me back to things I would rather forget, and I resent them for being capable of doing it. Yet I also know that removing them would make the rest of the work dishonest. If Marty showed only tenderness, affection and companionship, he would be giving you half a life. The joy would be beautiful, but it would not be true. If he showed only grief, abandonment, illness, fear and loss, that would be equally false. Human experience does not exist at one end of the emotional spectrum. Love and vulnerability arrive together. The deeper the bond, the greater the possibility of loss.

That is what I mean when I say pain can be the price of love. Love itself is not the wound. Love is what makes the wound matter.

The Price We Pay for Loving

Anyone who has lost a parent understands some version of this. Anyone who has buried a husband, wife, partner, sibling or friend understands it differently. A person who has cared for somebody through illness knows something else about it. Someone who has survived betrayal knows still another form. Those experiences are not interchangeable, but they share a human truth: another person became important enough to alter the shape of our lives.

Marty learned that lesson far earlier than anyone should have to learn it. His generation lived through the AIDS crisis. Friends disappeared. Communities became caregivers. Men and women did extraordinary things for one another while fear, prejudice and indifference existed around them. Some people left. Others stepped forward. Chosen families became families in every meaningful sense of the word. Women, friends, nurses, partners, artists, activists and people who simply refused to abandon somebody they loved became part of a history that cannot adequately be told through statistics.

Numbers tell us how many people died. Portraits remind us that each number had a face.

That distinction is central to Out of My Darkness—Into Our Light. Marty is not trying to illustrate a historical event as though he were preparing material for a textbook. He is showing what living through human events does to individual people. Grief has a posture. Caregiving has a posture. Exhaustion has a posture. Trust has a posture. So does tenderness.

The work extends beyond AIDS because Marty’s life extends beyond AIDS. The images encompass friendship, family, caregiving, chosen family, artists, women and allies, companionship, isolation, survival, memory, aging and mortality. People come into our lives. Some remain. Others disappear. We change one another whether we intend to or not, and eventually every one of us confronts the fact that what is can become what was.

What Deserves to Remain

Perhaps that understanding is why Marty has returned so intensely to figurative work at this point in his life. Mortality is no longer theoretical at 69. Time begins to have a different weight. The questions become less concerned with what might impress someone and more concerned with what deserves to remain. What deserves to remain, apparently, are people—not perfect people, not idealized people, not symbolic human beings polished into moral lessons, but the people who actually inhabited his life.

That is also why I resist describing this work simply as being “about the AIDS crisis,” even though that history is inseparable from it. Doing so makes the work smaller than it is. AIDS is part of the story because Marty lived it. Iowa is part of the story because he lived that too. Catholicism, family, art school, friendship, museums, caregiving, partnership, work, grief, aging and survival all enter because human beings do not experience life in neatly labeled galleries.

We carry everything with us. An image made today contains the person who made it today, but it also contains every earlier version of that person who survived long enough to stand there. The young Iowa art student who encountered Lasansky is still somewhere inside the 69-year-old artist making these new works. So is the young man who watched friends become ill, the caregiver, the museum educator, the designer, the partner, and the artist who stopped making one kind of work because life demanded something else and then, decades later, returned to it with far more life behind him. That accumulation is what gives the current images their weight.

Learning How to Look

There is another reason I think people should experience this work in person, and it comes from something Marty used to tell schoolchildren. During his years working in museum education, he sometimes found himself introducing children to an art museum for the very first time. Many of these school groups came from schools where English was their second language or where the children simply had never been exposed to the visual arts. Marty would explain the museum in a way they could understand.

He has told me many times how much he loved taking schoolchildren through museums, especially fifth graders who had never been inside one before. He wanted them to understand immediately that art was not something they had to be afraid of or something they already had to know how to “understand.” As I remember it, his perspective was simple: “An art museum is like a library. You don’t have to like every book, and you don’t have to like every work of art. Find what interests you. Look at what you love. And if something makes you stop and look again, pay attention to it. It may be telling you something you didn’t know you were looking for.”

Works of art are that way, if you let them do the work. Don’t judge what you are looking at before you have spent the time discovering the story that is right in front of you. You are not required to like any of the artwork Marty creates. Before you decide if it has any value to you, however, spend the time trying it out. I certainly do not like everything I have seen of his, and I have been living with the man for nearly thirty years. Some artwork may draw you close. Others may make you uncomfortable. One might remind you of somebody you lost twenty years ago. Another may show you something about a person sitting beside you that you have never quite been able to articulate.

The important thing is to look and take the time to see. Stand in front of the work rather than scrolling past it. Give the human figure enough time to stop being merely a figure and become somebody. Notice where the hands are. Notice the weight of one body against another. Look at the face, the shoulders, the distance between people, the places where light disappears into darkness and where darkness gives way again. And that is what he says is most important. “Looking and seeing costs you nothing…except your time”

Then bring yourself to the image.

What You Bring With You

That is the part no artist controls. Marty can tell you what he experienced. He can tell you why he created an image and who or what inspired it. During his talks surrounding this body of work, he can give you the story that exists on his side of the picture. What he cannot tell you is what you bring to it.

Your mother is not his mother. Your husband is not his husband. The friend you lost is not the friend he lost. Your childhood, religion, family, grief, happiness, disappointments and memories belong entirely to you. Yet something extraordinary can happen when a work of art provides enough space for those separate experiences to recognize one another.

The image becomes a meeting place.

That, to me, is where the title Out of My Darkness—Into Our Light finally makes sense. Marty can begin only with his darkness because that is the only darkness he has the authority to claim. He can show you what he knows, what he remembers, what frightens him, what he misses and what he has loved. Once the work leaves his studio, however, it no longer belongs entirely to his experience. The “my” can become “our.”

Finding Your Own Way Into the Work

Maybe you will see the exhibition and find one image impossible to forget. Perhaps you will hear Marty speak about the work and recognize something from your own life in a story that initially seemed to belong entirely to his. You may eventually own one of the prints and discover that living with an image changes your relationship to it. The forthcoming book will provide another way to encounter the complete body of work, to return to individual images privately and to spend time with them without the distractions of a gallery.

Each experience is different, and none requires you to respond exactly as I do. In fact, I hope you do not, because art would be terribly dull if we all agreed about it. What I hope instead is that you allow yourself to encounter these images honestly. Find the ones you love. Find the one that irritates you. Notice the image you cannot stop looking at even though you do not know why. Walk past something that gives you nothing and then return to something that somehow knows you.

That freedom—to choose, to respond, to question, to dislike, to remember and to discover—is one of the great privileges art gives us.

Love Was the Subject All Along

After almost thirty years with Marty, I thought I understood the source of his work. I assumed it was creativity because creativity has structured so much of our lives together. Only now, looking at these images as a body rather than as individual works made across decades, do I understand that creativity may simply have been the means.

Love was the subject all along.

Love for family. Love for friends. Love between partners. Love expressed through caregiving. Love is complicated by disappointment. Love threatened by mortality. Love is remembered after somebody is gone. Love strong enough to make grief possible and stubborn enough to survive it.

Even those images I hate belong there.

Especially those images.

Without them, I could look at the beautiful ones and pretend that love protects us from pain. It does not. What love can do is give us a reason to continue after pain has changed us. It can turn memory into action, grief into care, isolation into companionship and darkness, occasionally, into something another person can recognize as light.

Perhaps that is our real human superpower. We love knowing that everything we love is temporary. We make families anyway. We make friendships anyway. We care for people who may someday leave us. We create things knowing we will not remain forever to protect them. We tell stories about the people who are gone so someone who never met them might understand that they were here. Then, when words are insufficient, we make images.

For all of our grief, we love. For all of our fear, we love. For all of the people we could not save, the relationships we could not preserve, the years we could not hold onto and the moments that disappeared before we understood their importance, somehow we continue to love.

Marty Treinen has spent more than forty years making images of what that has cost him and what it has given him. I have spent nearly thirty of those years beside him. That is why I want you to see them.

Love is our superpower. The job of this artist is simply to make it visible. 

Sample Artwork From – .Out of My Darkness – Into Our Light     

For all of our love.

D. Wesley Spencer, Ph.D., is an educator, writer, and arts advocate whose work spans communication, performance studies, and creative development. He earned his doctorate in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and has taught communication and theatre at institutions including College of the Desert and Glendale Community College. A former Executive Director of the Las Vegas Shakespeare Company, Wesley blends academic rigor with a genuine love for community-based arts.

He is the co-author of Universal Creative Intelligence: How the Arts and Sciences Propel Human Advancement, a book exploring how creative thinking shapes learning, leadership, and human progress.  He also co-created Universal Leadership Education, a program that can teach anyone to become an exceptional leader.

As a columnist for The Palm Springs Tribune, Wesley covers theater, concerts, film, local talent, and cultural events throughout the Coachella Valley. His reviews are known for their warmth, clarity, and deep respect for the power of the arts. servicetoothers.uci@gmail.com 

Universal Creative Intelligence: How the Arts and Sciences Propel Human Advancement

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