Emphatic Scale 04 Painting

Mark is an LA-based artist whose inspiration to paint came from Picasso, Hockney, Frankenthaler, and his Ukraine-born grandfather. With an art career spanning twenty-five years, he learned to work viscerally and developed a capacity for risk-taking. Mark is an avid traveler and prolific painter who takes hundreds of photos of a city's streets and its centuries-old paint-chipped walls and brings it all home to decipher. Whether it’s a month in Morocco at an artist residency, a month in Lisbon, or a good sunrise in Los Angeles, Mark creates a dialogue of imagery, blurring the lines between abstract and realism. He blends oil paint, granite, and ground stone directly on the wooden canvas and then scrapes the elements away to reveal an image underneath. He has had exhibitions throughout the United States and sold them to collectors in Australia, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Mark has an adult child, Taylor, who he raised in California and Texas. He lives in Thousand Oaks, California, with his wife, Shellie, and their two dachshunds, Pablo and Penny Lane.