Mark Pack

Lives and works in Kansas City, MO, USA

Artist statement

In the simplest sense, I am painting about paint - but not as an end in itself. While exploring the material qualities and processes of painting, I am thinking about how it relates to life. I use the properties of paint as a metaphor for the exploration of time, destruction, rebirth, chance, and control. The same properties that are also visible in our lives. In my work, a sense of time is conveyed through the physical process of brushing, pouring and layering paint, sometimes hundreds of layers thick. Destruction happens through the cutting and reconfiguring of past layers and even the occasional recycling of a painting that was once considered to be finished. Rebirth materializes out the process of brushing, cutting, rolling and pouring layers of paint. Out of this structure a painting emerges. These layers are meant to recall the deposits that you may see in strata of rocks and sediment. Fossils or records of marks made before are left behind. Chance and control are forces that join together to complete the work. The process and result recall natural geological phenomenon with ourselves as part of the process, as agents of change.

Artwork