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I had never met Mark England, the spring morning when photographer Steve Coray and I approached his house in Alpine, Utah. Though I had seen his work in group and solo shows over the years I had never spoken with him. Luckily, after a short conversation on the phone a few days before, England had agreed to be interviewed for 15 BYTES.
The first thing I noticed when we approached his home were the bowling balls. Half-buried in the lawn, they line the walk to his front door. The bowling balls are your first clue. England is serious about what he does. His art extends throughout his entire environment. At the same time, that seriousness, that devotion to his art, is not afraid of whimsy or a good laugh. |
The art that England makes is intregal to his life. The house itself, built four years ago by England, is a canvas for his art. Most artists have their art hanging on their walls. England has it in his nightlights, embedded into walls as display boxes, and even in the form of a canoe, which hangs upside down, in his kitchen. The house is like one of England’s collage works, a mixture of diverse objects and images recontextualized by the hand of the artist.
Collage, which England calls "the art of the twentieth century," is the central focus of his work, and graphite his principal medium.
It was the way he had used the deceptively simple tool of a pencil to create large works of expansive beauty that had attracted me to England's art. Intrigued by the visual quality of the works, I had come to Alpine today to better understand how one might “read” a Mark England.
VISUAL IMAGES FIRST OF ALL
Comfortably seated in England's front
room, we began our journey through his art.
AOU: Walk us through the evolution
of your work -- how you came to use graphite as your principal medium.
ENGLAND: I’ve always felt
this affinity to drawing; partly because it is so viceral and direct and
simple and basic and partly because it is a requirement to draw well to
do
| anything else well . . . So I’ve always felt that need to at least get [drawing] down. While I was developing that skill [drawing] I was pursuing other ways of expressing myself in my artwork through collage, both two and three dimensional collage, which I developed while I was in my graduate program. I pursued both the collage and the drawing simultaneously for a number of years . . . I found that I was torn between what I wanted to develop with my collage work and what I wanted to develop with my drawing and eventually painting. Because of time constraints . . . I decided I would just focus on one. I gradually let the three dimensional collage become a minor aspect of my artistic expression . . . Most of my energy has now been devoted to the drawing with graphite as well as now incorporating solvent transfer with my drawings. |  Trial 36"x48" click photo to enlarge |
The
Gallery at the Center
UAC
Grantees at the Rio
Alternative
Venue: Cannella's
The
Menu at Meats Gallery
Paint
Utah in Logan
Gallery
Stroll Preview
What's Under Your Glass?
The
Coaster Project
On Saturday the 9th of March a diverse
and international exhibit opened at The Gallery at the Gay and Lesbian
Community Center in Salt Lake City. The exhibit was entitled the International
Coaster Project, Destination: The World
and was coordinated by the TransCultural Exchange in Boston and brought
to Salt Lake City by myself local artist and poet, Shawn Dallas Stradley.
In October of 2001, 100 artists from
around the world were invited to participate in The Coaster Project. The
requirements were as follows:
to make 100 coasters, approximately
4"x4", intended for exhibition and then use; establish a venue and schedule
for exhibition sometime between the 9th of March and the 19th of May, 2002,
and then arrange for a local establishment to use and distribute the coasters
after the exhibit.
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