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I recently attended Mark Webber’s single-artist show at Marywood University’s Mahady Gallery. I was there for the opening reception on Feb. 20, with the show running through March 28. It was one of the highest attended shows I have seen in this area; there must have been a thousand people through the show all evening.
Mark is a professor of painting, drawing and aesthetics at Marywood and is, I have heard, a great teacher and generous in support of the students’ creativity and future careers. I have previously reviewed some of his students and am reviewing another one soon, and I can testify to the quality of their work. You can sense an almost Webber-ian painting school — though an underground one — but one that lets the students’ own creativity navigate this subterranean river of knowledge.
Mark was born in Tacoma, Wash., has a bachelors of fine arts from Swain School of Design and a masters of fine arts from the noted Parsons School of Design. He was one of the founders of Prince Street Gallery in New York City and is also associated with Hackett-Freedman Gallery there. He has had many single-artist and group-juried shows in New York and in other parts of the country.
The Mahady Gallery show was juried by noted judges, so it is was a substantial honor for him to be given this show.
Mark works very slowly on a painting, usually for a year or two. But he is very disciplined in his art and paints nearly every night so he can accomplish a lot that way.
The works in the show either have no frames, as on the larger works where the paintings nicely wrap over wide sides of framing, or they are handmade by the artist out of wood left from his students’ work. Webber’s work is deceptively simple. It is figural work, usually human figures, but sometimes a pet dog makes his way into the art. It is therefore imitative or realistic, but that is only in part. All art, I have argued, is both imitative and expressionistic, and his art is also both but pretty much in a perfect balance.
It is the balance in his work of these two general trends in art that I personally find so attractive and yet ambiguous. I don’t think everyone will like his work. He is a person of strong likes and dislikes and strong personal judgments. He’s not overly fond of some famous artists I love or some of the great Expressionists even, so he won’t be surprised to hear that he won’t please everyone. And who does?
The general feeling about his work at the show was very positive and enthusiastic. I did overhear some comments that didn’t surprise me, though. One artist thought the work was too “sketch-like”; another thought the colors were “too muted”; a third thought “it’s just a bunch of people standing around!”
Now, all these things are true, in a sense, but it is all these things that appeal to me about his art and make it pretty damned distinctive. His work is sketch-like in the sense that it is not highly realistic. Those artists who want high realism in art will not be satisfied with his work. His work is not highly expressionistic either, except in texture and technique, but there is no strong emotion shown in his works. I have seen stages of realistic work shown in English art magazines, and out of five stages it is usually the third stage that I like the best. Now, superficially someone might say that this is a “sketchy” look and looks at a quick glance somewhat like Mark’s. But it is the impasto textures that he so masterly uses, his rough scumbling techniques that make this sketch criticism, to me at least, not totally valid. His colors I think are beautiful and glow as if with a deep fire- like burnt ashes. He loves lovely tints of rose and royal blues and golden- oranges and flat whites and medium grays, and muted browns, and that’s it. He uses a very limited palette and uses it with love over and over again, creating a tight body of work.
The figures are just standing around in a sense, too ... but so are we in real life! He strongly dislikes narrative stories in art in general. A man and a woman, together or alone, sometimes with a dog. Sitting and reading or dressing, bathing. All very simple setups for his art, which really comes in, I think, in his use of color and texture. The people are not always that realistic or natural looking; sometimes they are even a little stiff and wonderfully mannequin-like, but I don’t mean that in a bad way. Also, they are often quietly heroic and very human. The works seem timeless somehow, too. Mark does not work from models or photos but invents the scenes or sometimes uses classical works or Greek vase paintings for rough models. There is something highly classical about them, almost at times, in a playfully mannerist way. We can see Egyptian and Greek and Roman. I see Pompeii works in there somewhere.
One thing is missing from today, though: clutter and electronics. The furniture is simple and traditional, the tables and walls are bare — no stacks of things, no paintings even. It’s as if the artist is saying to us, “This alone is enough to be human — a friend, a bath, a book a pet dog.” He’s right, of course.
He can’t help but be classical, even academic at times, as he’s immersed in Giotto and Titian and Caravaggio and Corot and also in his beloved Bonnard and Derain, but also in Picasso and Matisse and de Kooning, but only in certain of their periods. These aren’t just names to him, they’re beloved mentors and friends.
The image shown here is cropped from “Large Bathers,” one of his larger works at the show and one of my favorites. I love the rose background and the simplicity of the pose and minimalist facial expression. It’s the textures, though, that really work with him, as usual. His work is like unearthing an archeological sculpture or artifact; it seems like there is still layer under layer of this work. It is created by putting wet paint over dry and then scraping away with palette knives or whatever.
The painting to me seems paradoxically very flat, and yet it has a mysterious depth to it. It’s as if the figure and the background are one somehow, vibrating with a single energy. The outlines are like two positive magnetic fields touching, yet not completely.
My favorite parts of the painting are the way that the bottom of her dress or slip is scratched with straight Euclidian lines and how the white of the slip comes up onto the bottom of her arms without seeming to be a mistake or unnatural at all.
I simply love and admire his work — it is his. He is a real artists’ artist and paints, ultimately, like Cezanne, whose colors Mark’s remind me of. He is a quiet genius — a quiet light.
He has said, “I don’t think that there is anything spiritual in painting, not any more spiritual than gardening or lovemaking or riding a bicycle.”
We can disagree about words of course, but I do disagree with the artist about his work not being spiritual. To me, it is exactly that! Maybe a secular spirituality, but art of depth and value and beauty.
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