Visionary Georgian's art environment gets a vibrant restoration

Before he took his life in 1986, Eddie Owens Martin would worry at times about what would become of Pasaquan, the magical art environment he had fashioned on a remote former farmstead over his last 30 years.

Martin was a guru with no followers, a visionary art trailblazer with few in the art establishment on his trail. He earned a living as a fortune-teller, the proceeds from which he pumped into his handmade wonderland of Technicolor-hued structures, totems and masonry fences, decorated walkways and commanding concrete sculptures.

Working under the name St. EOM, Martin liberally borrowed motifs from a panoply of exotic cultures, transforming his south Georgia parcel between Columbus and Plains into what his biographer Tom Patterson later termed "a sort of mock pre-Columbian psychedelic wonderland."