Artist Training
Mark began drawing at an early age and won national awards while in High School. He began pursuing art seriously at age 28 while having several young children and working full time as a self-employed brick mason. He built himself a small studio and began taking the winter months studying and practicing his drawing skills and also painting in oil. Attending art museums around the country was a stimulus that gave him incentive to continue working and growing. Viewing the works of the Barbizon painters who painted in the forests of Fountainbleu south of Paris made a tremendous impact on him. These artists were among the first artists to venture out into the countryside to seek inspiration and paint directly from life, what the French termed en plein air. He saw in their art and in the art of the French Impressionists who came after them a directness of approach, purity of color and truthfulness that registered strongly with his personal vision and aims as an artist.
Mark has deliberately steered away from art training found in most universities today where solid drawing and the craft of fine painting as handed down from earlier generations is seen as antiquated. Mark has pursued not what is seen today in some art circles as avant garde, but what has pulled him most emotionally and personally, and therefore has sought comradery and training elsewhere. Mark has since studied under some of the most prominent plein air painters of our day attending workshops around the country from Minnesota's Alteliers to plein air workshops in Texas and Colorado.