ABOUT THE ARTIST

Mark Lewis is a jeweller and silversmith living and working in London. He also has a longstanding interest in contemporary approaches to landscape drawing and painting. Mark was a principal lecturer in the John Cass Department of Art Media and Design at London Metropolitan University until 2009 and presently teaches part-time at the Birmingham School of Jewellery and the Goldsmiths’ Centre in London. Drawing has always been central to his practice and recent work has focussed significantly on gesture and mark-making to create forms of visual shorthand. Mark extensively promotes these techniques in a variety of educational contexts as methods of capturing the essence of form and structure and a way of liberating creative thinking.

THE EXHIBITION

21 May - 6 June 2014, Weekdays only, 10.00 - 4.30

Frederick Parker Gallery, The Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University, 41 Commercial Road, London E1 1LA

This exhibition represents the current output of an ongoing drawing and mark-making project in the form of a series of weekly visual diaries. These sketchbook journals are a response to the urban and rural landscape observed on Mark’s train journey which is undertaken every week from London Marylebone to Birmingham Snow Hill (and vice versa) on the Chiltern Mainline. This attempt to build up a different form of visual intimacy with a continually changing landscape viewed in different directions began over two years ago. The project has encouraged new ways of seeing which are essential when working spontaneously under self-imposed pressure.

COMMUTING WITH A SKETCHBOOK

The sketchbooks embody a series of changing seasonal narratives that attempt to establish a sense of place through immediate felt response, memory and cumulative knowledge. Each journey prompts a different engagement with the surrounding landscape and some drawing sequences are overlaid with responses from subsequent journeys; others are worked up later from recalled fragments, while more recent series are semi-abstractions generated almost totally from memory. While the earlier books were consistently figurative in character others have given way to the use of visual metaphors capturing landscape gestures, hidden structures, energies and patterns. Mark’s working methods are expressed through an extensive range of graphical media and drawing strategies including the recent use of an iPad.

These unedited visual narratives are representations or ‘visual cues’, which have the potential to tease out the truth of a landscape and may take on a greater reality than the actual perceived surroundings. The later minimalist approaches become a ‘distillation of realness’ suggesting that ‘less’ really is ‘more’.