Born in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, he acquainted the arts through his parents’ involvement with the local art scene. His father, a locally well-known painter and advertiser, and his mother who quit the arts to raise a family, planted the seed of his “disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.”
As a polio survivor he faced innumerable and sometimes, insurmountable challenges, which fed his not always acknowledged and well received appetite, for transformation and change.
Despite of these influences he developed a career in civil and coastal engineering fields that led him to many interesting projects, such as the coastal monitoring of a well-known Toronto Waterfront project, the construction of the Leslie Street Spit. Later on he embraced the visual arts to develop a missing facet of his life and personality. “At the core,” he declares, “of this art-engineering divorce lies my unfulfilled dream of becoming an artist-architect-engineer, such as Santiago Calatrava. Working with ideas and experimenting with materials and different media turn my imagination on; the engineer in me makes it possible.”
Finally, after moving to North America in 1986, he discovered the pleasure of stone carving in California, and decided to learn to draw after arriving in Toronto, Canada by taking classes and attending Life Drawing sessions at the Toronto School of Art. He then graduated with Honours from the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) Drawing and Painting Programme in 1996. His first solo show (“Architectural Sketches of Toronto”) took place in 1993. Since that time he participated in several group shows, and struggled to keep a balance between his two careers.
Soon after graduation he joined “Propeller Centre” artists collective until his departure in 1998 to devote most of his time and effort to his career as an engineering consultant, to privately work on his art projects, and to develop his skills as a digital painter.
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Alberto E. Martorana 1993-2006