Excerpt from article Surf 'n Turf by Kenneth J. Proctor, American Artist, Drawing, Winter 2007

France, Gorge d'Aveze is one of Marvin Saltzman's many waterfall drawings done or begun on-site. Improvisational yet highly disciplined, directly observed but with an unflinching eye on essential configuration, Saltzman shares what he saw. His drawing defines its own terms as visual essay and aesthetic experience. Line descirbes, and line is line. With a simple gray pencil Saltzman creates foliage, stones, and water, and with the same marks and soft tones he generates an abstract structure, taut with compressed, exuberant energy. From the stray arc venturing out into the empty boundaries of the sheet to the most densely developed pattern, every mark - there are no extraneous ones - plays its part in describing the falls and in developing the aesthetic idea and unity of the whole. Saltzman's pictorial space has an equally complex nature. Abstract space aligns with flat paper in support of patterns. Descriptive space orients vertically with the flow of water. Saltzman uses the full height of of his composition to accentuate the downward pull of gravity. Packed, piled high on the sheet, the most dense and weighty turf and leaf patterns squeeze into an hourglass, tighter at the top, opening below to the outward swirls of water, where, anchored and impeded by rocks, quiet gray tones slide off into liquid reflections. At the bottom of the sheet, at the near edge of our vision, where organic forms open into water and wave lines ripple into the void of the page, Saltzman's intuitive perspective pulls space out towards the eye. Seemingly pried loose from moorings higher up, rocks grow into boulders, anchoring the lower edge of the composition and locating the viewer in a Zen-like aesthetic of water and stone, soft and hard, flow and obstruction, rippling line and light tone.