Meet yer Maykr: Mark DeLura

On his blog, Form In The Fire, Peter Acheson recounts his recent visit to the studio of painter Mark DeLura.

Peter's posting prompted me to post images I took during a visit he and I made to Mark's studio back in November of 2010.

At that point, Mark had just embarked on his explorations of clusters of drip-tethered "splatters" (at this point, smaller scaled works done in oil on paper) which can be seen as the forebears of the paintings described in Peter's post.

On our 2010 visit Mark also showed us the large stripe paintings the pre-dated his (I'll just refer to them as "cluster") paintings.

What these works all share is the source of their chromatic character.  The colors here are not random "imaginary hues" but appropriated ones which have been found by the artist in the natural landscape and collected into a library through excursions in which they were mixed from nature.  

In Sept 2011 Mark's exhibit at the voluminous Re Institute in Millerton, NY paired his exploration of form and gesture with a new use of industrial paints (mostly silver and barn red).

It's interesting to me that, as with the earlier works, the colors Mark has chosen for the recent ones are not invented but appropriated and are readymade hues that are "naturally" found in the man-mediated landscape.


Peter will be speaking about his own work this coming Saturday, January 19 at 4pm as part of This Red Door's offering of events at the Kunsthalle Galapagos in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

Kunsthalle Galapagos is locate upstairs from the Galapagos Art Space.

I was able to check out both the Kunsthalle Galapagos and the TRD set up on Sunday when I went down to do a little recording for Dead Hare Radio, and to take in a reading of selections from Christopher Stackhouse's newly published volume of poetry, Plural.

The visual evidence of TRD's series of talks and presentations on the gallery walls.

Various readers shared selections of Christopher Stachkhouse's poetry.