Bio and Artist's Statement
Hotel in progress
Oil on canvas
Kinetic expressionist, Mark Mace, has skated, skied, run, read, climbed, hiked, mountain biked, motorcycled and danced his way through life. Other lifetime interests include anthropology, social psychology, history (especially mythological and religious history), paleontology, philosophy, economics, philology, esoteric studies, music and art history. He began painting, seriously, as a watercolorist in '91 with no inkling that his painting style could or should have the slightest relationship to the way he did anything else.
Working in concrete and stone (countertops design and fabrication) he is not unfamiliar with hard work. He initially assumed painting would require considerable effort. An apprenticeship in "sewing circle" groups and "workshops" doing "Bake sale" art led to teaching watercolor and some serious head scratching. The medium seemed rigid, technique- bound and subject-dominant. His students seemed to resist working in the principles of art (line, shape, hue, value and texture) - just wanted to learn to copy pictures! It seemed much of the art world had discovered recycling! Individual creativity and integrity were lost to difference for its own sake and many were copying something or someone. Whence art?
As a practitioner of yoga, Mark came to appreciate that doing art is an activity, the product of which is an artifact. "Subject" or "story" can be embedded in an artifact as one desires but are not necessary to its understanding as a product of artful behavior, e.g., music. In representational art the actor passes his/her vision at any moment in the process through the filter of ones total being in a dynamic relative universe. Dynamic self-expression asks that we be willing to abandon a degree of control and predictability in order to better understand the dynamic of creativity within relationship, among the principles of art, Self to selves as well as Self and selves to other(s). Life asks that we do our own work.
The Egypt, Escalante, Utah SOLD
Casting himself into the "sea of grace", New Year's eve '97, Mark started painting in oil without "instruction" or "technique", finding his skills greatly diminished in this slippery medium and artistic possibilities vastly expanded. While representation is evident in much of his painting, his most successful canvases are expressions from imagination, memory, physicality, anger. frustration, joy, play, rapture and amazement - part impulse, part response to what's developing in color, shape, line, value and texture - a dance of life across the canvas from inside out as well as outside in. His energy and humor are apparent in any form: portrait, landscape, still life or abstract.
Mark Mace paints and shows at his summer gallery in Ouray, Colorado - San Juan Art Galleries - 725 Main Street.
The Beaumont Hotel 40" x 48" SOLD
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