The Badlands Painting

Hello, my name is Mark Smith and I grew up in Petoskey, Michigan. I attended Olivet College and there I attained by Bachelors of Arts degree in Visual arts with a concentration in Biological Illustration. I began my journey as an artist at a young age. I first fell in love with art in elementary school with the encouragement of my mother, an art teacher. In middle school I gravitated towards making detailed colored pencil drawings of birds of prey and in college I fell in love with painting landscapes in oil. I started my landscape painting journey with largely impressionist and post impressionist roots then moved more towards pointillism and now incorporates all three of these respective styles into my work with more focus on a combination of realism and surrealism. I work in layers, starting my landscape paintings with a thin under painting of opposite hue to the final layer which contains liquin, an oil paint medium. In the next layer, I map out the painting using general shapes, hues, and tones still with less liquin included. As the painting progresses the shapes hues and tones become more concise and I work more Alla Prima, as opposed to the previous layers, which are generally wet on dry. The last steps for each one of my landscape paintings are signing, which I do by initialing a fitting area in the bottom right corner of the piece with colors fitting to the individual painting, painting the edges of the painting either to match the front of the painting or in a neutral tone, and varnishing, for which I use several thin layers of gloss varnish. As a youth I joined my family on road trips around eastern and western USA and vacations to the Caribbean. I was awed by the natural beauty I saw and intend for each one of my paintings to inspire that same sense of awe for everyone who sees them. In the future I intend to work on a larger scale to communicate a greater sense of awe at the natural world.