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While Mark M. Whelan's art is primarily portraits and figurative pictures. However, his aim is not to represent a beautiful image of a person or an individual in a futuristic context; rather, it’s an ongoing exploration of the process of how art is created concerning its structure, composition, colour, and technique. Like many figurative painters of his generation, it’s impossible for Whelan to avoid the looming shadows of Francisco Goya, Francis Bacon, Hieronymus Bosch and Lucian Freud, all of which have dominated the figurative world, their paintings both evocative, emotional and full of existential angst and anticipation of an uncertain future. However, Whelan is finding his futuristic path into the light, away from these titans of the art world, his work constantly seeking to go beyond the discipline of representational art and the more gestural expressionism that we are familiar with in the figurative paintings of Bacon.