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Mary Mark
- Mary Mark’s relief block prints, with her distinctive artistic style, are among America’s most often recognized and most recognizable images of any currently working printmakers.
- That distinctive style, as a result of two decades of retail exposure, has created a devoted base of art collectors throughout the United States and abroad.
- Inspired by the 19th and 20th century arts and crafts movement with its emphasis on unity of design, she frequently collaborates with her husband David Johnson to incorporate one-of-a-kind hand crafted frames created for each piece of art.
- Trained as a printmaker and painter at Ohio University in Athens, she has been widely recognized for her linoleum block prints depicting contemporary sanctuaries among the frenzy of a modern world.
- Her newest series are musing and reveries of landscapes and trattoria from a trip to Northern and central Italy in 2005.
- Mark sells her linoleum block prints, oil pastels and linocuts through many galleries and frameries throughout the U.S. and internationally, as well as through www.marymark.com.
- She exhibits in museums and competes in national art shows throughout the U.S.
- She has won numerous awards, grants and was recently featured in ArtistMagazine and will soon be on the cover of Sunshine Artist.
Recent Awards
- 1st place in Drawing & Printmaking at annually at Summerfair in 2004 through 2007
- Exhibited in 2007 at The Butler Institute of American Art’s Mesaros Print Gallery in a one woman 20 year retrospective of her block prints entitled “Mary Mark: Works on Paper.”
- Was favorably reviewed in the Journal of the Print World’s spring 2007 issue as a result of the Butler Institute show.
- Best in Printmaking in both 2006 and 2007 at the Krasl Art Fair on the Bluff in Benton Harbor, Michigan.
- Best in Printmaking at the 18th Annual Downtown Highland Park Street Fair & Craft Show in 2007
- The Artist Merit Award at the Cherry Creek Art Festival in Denver, Colorado 2005
- Best in show at the Behringer Crawford Museum Regional Juried Competition in both 2005 & 2004.
- Best of Show at the 2004 Hyde Park Art Show.
Reduction Linoleum Block Printing Style
- The process by which Mary Mark creates a print spans a three to four month timeframe, requiring that the created image be prepared through a number of meticulous steps including the separation of her original vision into 20 different image stages that must each be carved, printed, and registered to the final result.
- Mark’s major artistic inspirations include the funky perspectives of Cezanne, the fully saturated colors of Matisse accented by the dramatic black line of Baskin, using Picasso’s reduction linoleum methods and housed in a pre-Raphaelite presentation. These very contemporary settings and landscapes are heavily textured, pattern on pattern images out of a turn of the 19th to 20th century tradition.
- Mark creates compelling contemporary still life images and landscapes using modern living spaces, real world locations and accoutrements with the suggestion of human habitation but without the actual figures, forcing the viewer to imagine being an artistic subject rather than simply viewing them. These images put the viewer in the frame.
Lost Steeple Originals
- Lost Steeple Originals was founded by Mary Mark and David Johnson in 1987 to create, license and distribute their artwork.
- Mary Mark and David Johnson resides and works in an 1876 church building known as Lost Steeple Originals, formerly St Paul’s German Evangelical Church in New Richmond, Ohio, a small river town outside of Cincinnati. It is a functioning printmaking and woodworking studio without a religious congregation.
For more information, go to: www.marymark.com |
