Lua and Segomo: War Gods in Spring Painting

New Zealand born Mark Cross moved at the age of 23 to his wife’s home on the Polynesian island of Niue and it was during these early years that a strong philosophic and stylistic foundation was established for his career as an artist. Due to this continued isolation, Cross has worked on the 'periphery', of the traditional art industry. Cross has developed a reputation as one of the South Pacific’s leading contemporary realist painters and now divides his time between studios in Niue and New Zealand while travelling and exhibiting elsewhere. His paintings over time have emerged from being informed by the extended immersion in an isolated, water-bound, natural environment into a universal vision that questions the foibles of Mankind. Elements of the New Zealand and Niue environment became the atmospheric stages for these allegorical communications although more recently he has employed similarly unique landscapes from around the world. In their ethereal, visionary way, the works warn of the dire ecological imperatives that face both a small island and a planet. Mark Cross has achieved through his work a uniqueness that avoids the trappings of provincialism, so often associated with realism, and replaces it with an acutely perceptive worldview. Rarely exhibiting in dealer galleries, the artist's work often sell straight from the easel. Artist Statement: Although all my paintings are obviously based on specific places, those places are secondary to the motivations to depict them. I use landscape elements in all my paintings not to depict that place but as an avenue for other ideas. Clues to these ideas are usually in the titles. When traveling for any reason I am always on the lookout for landscape elements that I might be able to use. Water is such an important element and at risk of pollution, over exploitation, acidification etc so that has been a central element in recent years while I am always trying to find different ways of using it to express my ideas. So, in short, the location of the landscape used isn't really of interest to me but is a means of illustrating a universal idea.