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It is a simple and profound act of faith to venture forth into the unknown; art is an act of faith. It is the search, the process and adventure, the battle well fought on that terrible field of white canvas, the journey that is art, as much or more than the destination, which matters. Art matters. | ||||||
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Mark has a BFA and MS in printmaking, and an MFA in painting. Recent art works have focused on the landscape, real and conceptual, natural and man-made, with particular attention to interrelationships between those facets of landscape. The art works seek a synthesis of traditional linear perspective components with aerial views, map elements, photo collage, and mathematical/conceptual diagrams. Photos of surface details and additional art works not posted on the web are available.
ARTIST STATEMENT
If
you grew up in square rooms, in square houses, walking square blocks to square
schools in the square towns of square states, you might find a square, or
perhaps more properly a grid,
becoming an unavoidable form in your landscape paintings and an inescapable
conceptual component in your view of a land, in your idea of home. The subject of primary concern in my
work today is place, the landscape of the northern high plains and recently the
Bird’s-eye views of earth’s organic forms intermeshing with geometric grids on
the ground below an airplane window I find endlessly fascinating. Unless cloud cover precludes even
foggy glimpses, I cannot pull myself from that window. The streaming sequential views
driving and steadily shifting transitions of hiking across the plains, through
those vast spaces, are ever intriguing and often exhilarating for me. Memories of place, the feel as much
as the look, haunt my existence.
String memories of those multiple visions together, dump them on a canvas, and
stir them into visual equivalents of place and memory and you’re close to my
artistic process. That process and
the interests behind it run through squared grids, past place, and beyond
particular locations to include also land-use patterns, geography, cartography,
aerial and satellite photography, geology, and topography. In the work, this is coupled with an
appreciation for a slant and refraction of light, colors reflected to the eye by
land and sky, textures under foot and at hand, and, perhaps more than all else,
space, that fraught emptiness of these lands as felt, seen, remembered, and
conceptualized. All of these
interests, in varying and unpredictable combinations, provide the subject for my
work. Each work is truly an exploration, a search for form, and for meaning in form. My earlier work, stylized and owing heavily to surrealist ideas and processes, left me with a willingness to trust the random, and a faith in the power of automatism, in automatic mark-making. Today my landscapes frequently still find their genesis in combinations of randomly selected snapshots, arbitrary selections from maps and aerial or satellite images, random fragments of cold geometry, odd assortments of memories, together with drips, spatters, trails, and scrawl of unconscious automatic gesture. To these beginnings, I bring a formalist’s training and marry in a guiding hand of memory as it re-presents to me, perhaps a specific place, and/or a generalized locale, plus, an ever-impassioned, personal, visceral response to land and its space.
It
is a simple and profound act of faith to venture forth into an unknown; art can
be such an act of faith. In artistic
searches, processes, and adventures, in battles well fought on terrible fields
of white canvas, it is the journey,
as much, or more than the destination, which matters. In the resultant works, it is my hope
that a viewer can retrace the journeys, both routes pursued, abandoned, and
roads not taken, can sense struggles and elations in paint and painting, and can
finally enjoy this exploration of limitless possibility.
It
is also my hope that these elements of form, individually and in concert,
delight the eye, satisfy an innate sense for quality, sound rich chords
recalling spaces and lands remembered and dreamt, real and archetypal, and that
the works engage the intellect and imagination and resonate in the heart of the
viewer. Finally, through an
exploration and discovery of form, I hope to convey content, to convey a love of
great and small, of the timeless and fleeting, and of the grand unity in the
Taoist’s Ten Thousand Things of this world, at bottom, to convey a love for
place and all of nature.
RESUME
Mark’s work hangs in private, university, corporate, and public collections. Mark has worked as an
artist-in-residence in schools (kindergarten-university) in both
EDUCATION 1992-94 MFA – Painting, Illinois State University 1989-92 MS – Printmaking, Illinois State University
Marshall Dulaney Pitcher
Award –best student portfolio - 1994 1985-89 BFA – Printmaking, Minnesota State University, Moorhead
ORGANIZATIONS
SDAN
SODA ABH Artists of the Black Hills
SELECTED LIST OF EXHIBITIONS
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Warrior’s Work, Ben West Gallery;
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Green Ink Gallery & Studios: Deadwood, SD – co-owner with spouse, artist Mary
Wipf – 2005-present.
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Apex Gallery; South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, SD;
Explorations & Intimacies: Recent Works by Mary Wipf & Mark Zimmerman, Jan.
9 – Feb. 25, 2004. Two-person
exhibit.
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Karl E. Mundt Library Gallery;
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Frogman’s Press & Gallery;
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The Dahl Central Gallery; Rapid City, SD; Black Hills Landscapes, Oct. 16
– Nov. 30, 1997. Group Exhibition.
·
The
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Isaac Lincoln Gallery; Northern
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Minot Arts Gallery;
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Second Crossing Gallery;
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The
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Loyola University Fine Arts Department Gallery;
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Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, Peoples Republic of China; American Midwest
Artists – Traveling Exhibition, Feb. 1, 1991 – Mar. 30, 1992. Invitational group exhibition.
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Moorhead State University Gallery;
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Moorhead State University Gallery;
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