Charlie Brown Jr.
I initially came into contact with Anthony Mark’s work about six years ago. According to him, this was right about the time he really began painting, a date that coincides with the birth of his oldest daughter Odessa. When I ask what he was doing prior to this point in time, he assures me that he did in fact own brushes, canvasses and oils. However he had not really been painting. Prior to the birth of Odessa he was fooling around with paints in his free time. She was his first muse.

Odessa’s mother, Jess, is an old friend of mine dating back to our days at Kutztown Area High School. While at home from college some years later, I learn that she has returned to Berks County, given birth to a child, and settled down in a farmhouse on a large plot of land outside Kempton. I decide to pay the new family a visit. Anthony immediately impresses me with his genuine down-to-earth personality. He speaks softly yet assuredly, sitting on his patio with cold beers as the sun sets over the hills. He is interested in the small, subtle moments that these quiet Kempton hills offer, moments taken for granted by most folks. He talks at great length of a deer he had walked up upon and made brief eye contact with a few days prior, pausing several times to internally reflect on the moment so as not to leave out a single detail in his description of the encounter. There seems something spiritual to him about sharing time and space with the elements of nature, as if moments like this bear special significance on a man’s soul.

Eventually he tells me that he’s been working on some paintings and asks if I would like to take a walk down to the barn where he’s set up a studio. In the dim dusty light of the barn I am astonished by what I see. Canvasses propped up against every available structure. Some are abstract in nature, depicting contorted human forms twisting around themselves. Others portray very realistic scenes of his daughter in the natural world. All the work shares vivid color schemes that seem to jump off the canvasses, and express a vibrancy for life. However, it is not just canvasses that the man is painting on. There are paintings on pieces of burlap stretched and lashed to tree branches found in the forest outside his house. Other images have been put directly onto plywood and old wooden planking found lying around the old barn, or pieces of curtain no longer hanging in windows. Reflecting on those early days, years later, Anthony tells me that money was very tight back then, and painting supplies were a luxury that he often could not afford. He had to paint with whatever he could find. The important thing being that he had to paint.

Since that initial visit I’ve become better friends with Anthony and have followed and admired his work, watching him mature in theme and technique as an artist. Anthony and family recently moved to a house on State Street in Hamburg. Walking around Mark’s welcoming home is like touring a gallery. It is difficult to comprehend the fact that all of the work I’m taking in has been generated in the last five years. Furthermore, the intimidating collection, which takes the better part of the evening to casually peruse, contains only work that has not been sold, a fraction of that which Mark has painted in recent years.

I’m drawn into a piece entitled Catching Tadpoles, an oil on canvass work depicting Odessa and her younger sister, Sophia, discovering the smaller life of the marsh outside their former Kempton home. The girls are captivated by the tiny intricacies of life, taking after their father, cautiously observing the insects, tadpoles and the world they inhabit. I in turn find myself captivated by the girls and their curiosity. Anthony enjoys painting his daughters in the act of doing something. He tells me that Odessa and Sophia’s grandparents ask why the girls are never painted in portrait. They are more frequently shown from behind or in profile but very rarely straight on. The girls are always interested in something, engaged in some activity, exploring some new aspect of life. They do not sit still. They are active beings, which is what makes them engaging subjects. Mark captures the girls in that moment of discovery and their pursuit of knowledge. This pursuit is what is pure and beautiful about being a child, and what makes his paintings of the girls so special.

Mark has three aesthetic styles he seems comfortable working in. The first and most prolific are the idealistic depictions of his daughters. My favorite painting from this group, Pop Pop and the Crab Trap, depicts a wonderful scene of Sophia and Odessa getting a lesson in crabbing from their great-grandfather, which like Catching Tadpoles brings us the girls in another moment of captivated curiosity, while Pop Pop glows at the opportunity to pass down knowledge and tradition. I contemplate this piece while mulling over Anthony’s previous comment regarding the grandparents and their desire to see the girls in portrait. It seems, at this particular moment, absurd to me that people through the ages have chosen the still portrait as the preferred method of painting or photographing for family archival purposes. The image of the girls watching Pop Pop set a crab trap provides so much more information than a scripted portrait could ever illicit. This painting says something about the family, who they are, what they do, how they interact.

When not painting his daughters in action, Mark often works with a series of “collapsed nude” figures. These abstract characters often appear contorted, twisted and strained, as if jammed into the rigid confines of the square two-dimensional canvass. In Collapsed Nude (Blue) IV the entrapped figure bears resemblance to Mark with his grizzled beard and disheveled mop of spiraling black hair, which makes me wonder if this is supposed to be a self-portrait. Mark is less willing to talk about his intentions with these pieces. He tells me that it’s my job to try and decide what’s going on in the canvass. If he has to give explanation to these highly interpretive figures, all the fun gets sucked out of them. I imagine that it is a self-portrait, weighted down and twisted up by the stress and hardships of trying to support a family, commute to a day-job he hates, and be a father. The graffiti covering the naked body represents the markings of the world around him constantly trying to paint him as someone different, someone who is able to conform to such rigid confines with ease. After coming to this determination I wonder if Anthony’s explanation, if there ever was one, is more or less pretentious than mine.

For Mark, realism and the abstract have their point of convergence in a rather startling series of paintings depicting iconic religious figures. The colors in these works are bright and vibrant, each figure denoted by a specific hue. Elijah sits at the base of a mystic blue waterfall washing his hands in the water as the dark birds pass overhead. This painting, from his early days, is on a piece of curtain. Samson and Delilah also on a piece of curtain, wrap themselves around each other on a bed of blood red, Delilah possessing several arms, a trait evocative of the Collapsing Nudes. The style is an interesting take on Christian iconography, lending typically European imagery to an aesthetic more commonly associated with folk art of Latin-American or Native-American cultures.

Anthony has never professed any devout Christian beliefs to me. When we have discussed spirituality the conversation has always found anchor in man’s relationship to nature. Mark finds a bit of his ancestry rooted in Native American heritage and speaks fondly of his mother sharing with him the culture and traditions of the tribes that once called the hills of Pennsylvania home. He has a definite interest in legend, lore, and iconography regardless of which ethnic tradition it comes from. He shows me an oil painting on burlap that depicts an eagle and a snake on top of a pile of blood, cactus and limbs with a cross embedded in the human rubble. The painting is entitled Mexico City. Mark tells me how he painted it one day after work when a coworker told him the legend of Mexico City. The nomads, who would become the Aztecs, had a prophecy that they would one day find an eagle resting on a cactus eating a snake, and that this spot would be where they would build their city. They found their spot and built their city, which they called Tenochtitlan. Cortez would eventually come along and lay the city to ruin and rebuild it as Mexico City.

As is true of most of his paintings, he is not interested in making sweeping statements of a political or social nature as so many of the young aspiring artists I encountered regularly at university had attempted, without much success. Mark seems more interested in capturing a moment in time and nature. Saving that moment for future reflection and contemplation is the goal. Whether the moment is born in the subtelties of his daughter’s growth and education or the time honored legends that cultures and philosophies are built on makes little difference. Both are treated with playful reverence, which is what make this house and this painter nestled in the sleepy town of Hamburg so special.

Anthony Mark is currently working on album cover art for the up and coming band No Go Know.
His work can be seen on his myspace page at: http://www.myspace.com/amarkfineartist

Print This Article
Email (and more) with