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George
Marks, Jr. places the finishing
touches to one of his works of art.
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Needham artist, George Marks has been painting and
developing his skills as an artist for over forty years, and his
paintings reflect it. He’s established, comfortable with his work,
still excited about the prospect of improving, even after all these
years, and eager to produce even more art for a wider audience long into
the future.
“I come from an artistic family,” he says,
modestly, as way of explaining his extraordinary drive to paint every
day, proud of a heritage that boasts a mother who “is still painting
at ninety years of age.”
You get the feeling from talking with Marks that
he will not only follow family suit, but that his enthusiasm to create
vivid impressionistic landscape images and offer them to the buying
public is truly boundless.
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“I paint every day,” he says of his drive,
emphasizing, “Not a day goes by that I don’t paint.” And it has
been that way for decades.
An artist who enjoys working in solitude from his
studio in Chatham, MA., Marks says he does his best work from intuition.
“I start with a bare canvas, a dark color, brown, and then layer
lighter colors on top of it, sometimes with my hand, and see what comes
of it, one painting at a time.” If all this seems a little
disorganized, for a profession that requires some attention to detail,
don’t be fooled. The artist speaks from years of experience, fortified
by access to an accumulated color library of formulations and mixtures
that he commits to writing and “files away like a recipe book.”
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"Blue Fence",
18" x 24", a/c, © by George
Marks, Jr.
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“I see things in nature that inspire me,” he
says of how he chooses his subjects, “and I paint what I like. But if
inspiration doesn’t come, I still paint anyway.” From a palette that
he defines as “on the soft side, favoring greens and blues, and his
own brew of special mixtures, he says that when he starts to paint
“something eventually begins to emerge, and I’ll say: ‘I was
there’ or ‘I’ve seen that before’, I then get into something and
have to close it. Then, I have to finish before I move on. You can be
your own inspiration.
Admittedly not a prolific painter, he averages
about 15 paintings a year, Marks says that he spends hours
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studying his
art while he’s painting. “I may spend five minutes applying paint to
a surface and another three hours looking at one square inch of canvas
before continuing.”
His style of painting: slowly, methodically, paying
attention to small details and color, reflect not only how he started
four decades ago, but what he recommends to aspiring artists who ask his
opinion on how best to enter the field themselves.
When he began to seriously consider an artistic
career, he relied on his own intuition and trial and error to hone his
skills. Self-taught, he says he experimented with color and light and
visited museums where he would “sit for hours in front of paintings
that attracted me.” He says his method of study and concentration,
which he practices even today, opened his mind to color, texture, depth
and nuance that is the foundation of his considerable knowledge base. To
those who seek a career in art, he recommends they follow the same path.
“I don’t recommend taking courses,” he says, believing that hours
spent in school may stifle a young, inquisitive mind. “When a young
artist learns from a teacher,” he says, “he becomes somewhat of a
clone of that teacher.”
| Marks says impressionist artists such as Chase,
Benson, Homer, Sargent, Bunker, and contemporaries such as Wolf Kahn,
whose work borders on expressionism, are individuals he seeks to emulate
but in a style that he hopes is seen as uniquely his own. A truly
creative impressionist, Marks says that although he will occasionally go
outdoors to do a sketch for an idea, he prefers to invent what he
paints. “All my landscapes are invented,” he says. “I invent my
paintings by moving paint around canvas until I get to a place that
looks good, or looks like some place that I might have seen.”
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"Early Summer Light",
18" x 24", a/c,
© by George
Marks, Jr.
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So much of what he does is visceral and comes from
the imagination and is of such importance to his own success and
self-definition as an artist that he recommends that viewers of his
works feel as well as view what he has to offer. On painting with
acrylics on canvas, he says, “I like what I do with it. I love canvas.
It’s bouncy; it moves. In fact, I encourage people to feel my
paintings; the smoothness and bounce is fabulous. You have a
relationship with canvas that you can’t get with board,” he says.
“It’s almost like it’s alive. People should experience it as well
as view it.”
To expose his work to a greater audience, Marks
says he relies on brochures, mailings and his gallery contact, the
Winstanley-Roark Gallery, to promote his work to the widest audience
possible, an undertaking he says they have met and surpassed through
advertising and Internet promotions. “I think about where I want to be
five years from now every day,” he says, reflecting on his long career
in art, and his recent decision to devote all his time to painting full
time. “I’d like to be selling more than I do. I’d like to have
buyers that have multiple buys.” To achieve this objective, Marks
says, it will require that he produce more and concentrate on little
else except pleasing the art buyer ¾
an undertaking he seems fully devoted to achieving, for he has little he
needs to prove to anyone else.
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"Vernal Pool",
24" x 18"", a/c,
© by George
Marks, Jr.
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Indeed, an experienced professional, who enjoys
painting inventive, though traditional New England scenes, Marks says
he’s been in juried shows and has been a juror himself, and has gone
the route of seeking approval from others in his field, but that at this
stage in his career, that type of professional, associational activity
doesn’t interest him any longer. “In a juried show you only get the
opportunity to show one or two of your works. When I’m in a gallery I
can display everything I’ve done. There’s greater choice.”
From a lifetime of experience, structured on a long
history of knowledge gained from trial and error, and an encyclopedic
data base of unique color formulations that work for him and please the
eye of the discriminating buyer, George Marks, today, has never been in
a better position to make the jump full time, to emerge and show the
world what he has. “A lot of young artists today want to send a
message with their work. I don’t want to do that,” he says of his
efforts. “I want to paint ”
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and continue to improve by evolution. I’m
never satisfied.” To the
extent that he wants to send a message, he says it’s this: “I’m
doing my best and always trying to do better.
George Marks’ considerable talent, his ambition, his
untiring commitment to his work, and painter’s eye for the kind of
inventive detail that exemplifies the best of the impressionistic style,
assures the collector of art that, truly, the cost of a George Marks
painting is considerably less than its intrinsic value.
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