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Price graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with BFA in Painting and Printmaking. After graduation, he concentrated on doing woodworking and architectural drawing to make a living and painted and drew only sporadically. In 1997 Price began painting and drawing seriously again and built a body of work that began to express what he would like to bring forward. He painted in oils and drew in sketchbooks, figures in dream-like spaces using an expressionistic-realist style. In 1999 he moved from Virginia to Maine where he lived, worked and painted for almost ten years, allowing the Maine land and cityscape to affect his artwork. He was especially drawn to its rocky coastline and has drawn many rocks and rock formations which lead to other things.

He started stippling, building pictures with tiny dots in his sketchbooks, this is an early drawing that he stippled, one out of hundreds, later after relocating to Maine he began to use colored inks combined with very little pastel to create small stippled paintings, these are two examples, City Life and The Moon is a Troubling Thing. These two were very much inspired by the city of Portland, Me. and the many very interesting buildings he found there to look at. Stippling taught him a process where he can slowly build a picture putting lots of good energy into it over the time it takes to make a thousand dots of various colors. The important thing is to slow it down somehow and work uncritically letting things kind of gestate as the picture comes together. Subject matter to Price is like his morning cup of coffee, it may be what gets him out of bed but it is not what his day is all about. He begins an image with an idea that gets himself going then makes a critical decision to do something with it and sketch it out according to how he thinks best to convey the idea. After that something else takes over in the working of the image, the energy over time that goes into it is returned invariably.

“My intent as an artist is to bring a sense of disquietude out in my work there is no beauty without a sense of disquietude, the intimations of something beyond our normal experience of reality. I have always been attempting to make poetic images, that is evocative of something deep within our collective psyche. ”

Influences:
“Surrealism is very important to me, my imagery has been influenced by many surrealists and borderline surrealists artists such as H. C. Westerman, Robert Crumb, Magritte, Picasso, Paul Delvaux, Paul Klee and Odilion Redon. My figure style owes a lot to the popular imagery of our own time, pinups and comic book art but I have drawn from life and looked at a lot of figurative sculpture as well. I like Aristide Maillol, Thomas Moore, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Indian temple sculpture and by many classically inspired female figures from the Renaissance and later. My work is not cubist but I have learned a lot about composition from Braque and Picasso and the pseudo cubism of Paul Klee, I’ve spent hours doodling in the cubist idiom but haven’t done much with it, this is one example of much I haven’t done with it. My surrealism is the ‘stuff of dreams’ and the ‘magic of Hollywood.’ Your responses to my work are very much appreciated.”

See available works by Mark Price here.