Mark Andrew Child
I was walkin' home half in the dreamin'/The things I was thinkin' I was singin'
MessageBorn on the parochial South Side of Chicago, I escaped into the wider world. Found mystery, love, heartache like everyone else and spent the better part of forty years trying to put it into words. Still do, but for the last ten years or so have been using color and form to further the work. Artists like Joan Mitchell, Frank Bowling, Jack Whitten, and Anselm Keifer light signal fires. Poets like Jim Harrison, Seamus Heaney, Gregory Orr, and Jane Hirshfield do the same and it all feeds the fire I tend. I've taught, but try to spend my days learning.
Statement
Abstract works operate as parables—not fables, or stories with an answer or obvious moral, but as unprestate-able questions that, if the work is honest, find their resolution in those who place themselves before the image and let it work on them. The subject is the paint or medium used, and how that reverberates inside the viewer. For some it will spark nothing. For others a conflagration erupts. The only task I have in any of this is to be as adept and complete as I can be, to subsume technique to open the possibility of encounter, the encounter that silences the mind in order for the spirit to recognize something it didn't know it needed, something that makes unutterable, intuitive sense.
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