Interview by Jimon

1-Where do you currently reside and work?  I currently reside in Calgary, Canada.

2-How would you describe Mark Mullin?  I’ve always been someone who is fascinated by the act of looking and how it can be such an enchanting puzzling experience.  This started very early, me as an only child who filled his time drawing and practicing magic, and making puppets, models and kites.  And now with my painting practice I still immerse myself in a world of creating new visual propositions that challenge my sense of what can and cannot or should and should not inhabit the same environment.  Having two young daughters age 3 and 4 and half allows me to observe their visual thinking and be enchanted by that.

3-Did you attend an art school or is it inherent?  I did attend numerous schools.  I completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.  Shortly after that I studied printmaking as a guest student at the Art Academy in Hamburg, Germany.  I followed this by completing Masters Degree in Fine Art from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.   I have also found that attending artist residencies can be invaluable once one is done “ going to school”.

4-How long have you been making art and what lead you to start?  I’ve been a professional artist approximately 25 years now.  I suppose like most, my art making started at a young age.  I was quiet and shy and communicating visually was far natural to me than verbally.  I had never really painted at all until my first year of undergraduate where I experimented with it a bit and thought it held some intrigue.  In second year I was exposed to oil paint and canvas and I was fully hooked.  I knew then that this is what I not only wanted to do, but had to do.  This material and medium opened up a new reality to me and in turn gave me a voice I had never experienced.  The silent loud voice of paint.

5-How did you acquire your style?  My style is not something that I consciously set out to develop or acquire with the intent of it looking a certain way.  I can see now looking all the way back to my work in school that I’ve always had tendencies and affinities when painting,  for instance my brush work has always been applied  in horizontal and vertical movements.  I have always been interested in forms being cropped by the edges of the painting.   I have continually been interested in paint creating a space of atmosphere or vapor or cloud like forms.  My style has really been the accumulation of looking and borrowing from what I see around me and trying to develop a visual vocabulary that best speaks back to me.  My style has been affected by the instructional diagrams of theoretical physics, and the covers of Silver Age Spiderman comics.  Early Atari games and shadow puppet theater.  It really is a mix of intriguing paint maneuvers – compelling visual debris.

6-Have you ever come across a piece of art that you could not or did not want to stop looking at?  Yes of course.  There is a painting by Matisse at the MOMA in New York called The Piano Lesson.  It so brilliantly composed.  Whenever I am at the museum I spend extended times looking at it because it is both so elegant and so awkward at the same time.  It always feels slightly incomplete yet so perfectly resolved in its slight incompleteness.  Its very hard to explain, I guess you just have to see it.  I suppose this binary of elegant and awkward is something  I find compelling in my own work and this transfers to what I seek out or notice in other artists’ works.  We look at everything through the colored lenses of our own artwork.

7-Tell us something about the art world that you want to see changed?  I would like to see a wider representation of diverse cultures within contemporary art and the art market.  It is changing thankfully.

8-Why make art?  Personally it is the most freeing way to express my visual curiosities.  It’s my way of questioning my perceptual reality and at the same time understanding my perceptual reality.

9-The future is _________?  The future is not to be taken for granted, but belongs to everyone equally.

10-Is there any reality behind your paintings or are they purely fantasy?  There is definitely reality.  I firmly believe that fiction or make believe is one of the most effective routes to access that which is more deeply actual.  I do not literally attempt to represent or illustrate subjects in my work but I do want my forms and compositions to suggest or hint at things that one feels is almost definable.  It is my strategy that the origin(s) and reference(s) for these works change with interpretation. An organic thread-like filament of paint appears biological, then shifts to Japanese writing found on food packaging, then again to tag-like names from street graffiti. Pockets of deep recessive space dissolve, suggesting a “pre-world”, which in turn is swallowed by replicating forms, oddly autonomous yet keenly interested in symbiosis. No form settles into character for long before an alternate proposition comes to light. The result is something of an impenetrable “catch me if you can” engagement. The act of looking becomes a fool’s game of defining.  When one looks at the paintings I want to engineer a feeling that we almost know what we are looking at – a visual corollary for searching for a word that is “on the tip of your tongue”.

11-What advice would you give putative collectors?   Acquire work that stimulates and challenges you.  Do not collect work as a form of décor.  Investigate various media and movements that will provide a context to your interests.  Once you have decided to collect from an artist keep acquiring from that artist over many years.  There is a fulfillment in possessing a lineage of an artists work.  To have a record of that artist’s decision making over decades is fascinating.

12-What’s the best advice you’ve ever received in regards to your art?  Best advice I was given was by my thesis advisor Leo Plotek in graduate school.  He said “ trust that the viewer is as sensitive and nuanced as you are and in doing so you won’t alter your work to pander”.

13-How do you define success?  My definition of success has been changing as I’ve aged and evolved.  It used to be based upon the number of shows I had in a year or amount critical public praise.  Now it is more about the work. How honest am I being with my work.  How authentic am I being.

14-Do you have a place/person/thing that you visit for inspiration?  Currently my most pervasive inspiration has been in my two young daughters’ bedroom where I tell them improvised stories every night before bed.   The intuitive cobbling of elements to make a compelling story has many parallels to my painting practice.  So elements that I conjure in the stories often emerge in my work in the studio.

15-If you could have dinner with 3 artists living/dead who would be at your table?  Kathe Kollwitz, Philip Guston and Albert Oehlen.

16-Name three things you can’t live without in your studio?  Aside from the obvious paint supplies I would say my Ipod ( yes I actually still use one and its covered in paint), my coffee maker,  and my leopard print couch.

17-How would someone find you on Social Media?   You can find me on Instagram  @markcmullin