Drawing III
September 21st, 2018
Samantha Chilelli
Mark Powell
            Mark Powell is a ball point pen artist from London. He focuses mostly on making large portraits and even sometimes birds on different types of antique documents. The portrait below shows the image of an older man in black ball point pen. It is placed on national geographic prints from new papers. He tends to mostly paint older people and it appears very well on the papers he chooses. He also pays a lot of detail to the emotions he is trying to depict. The prints he chooses bring a sense of history to his drawings. Mark says “A face that is devoid of a clear emotion gives an ambiguity that is simple and intriguing, it shows the signs in scars of travel and an uncontrolled gaze; a life lived. The canvas of vintage envelopes holds the same qualities, travel scarred and mysterious.” When asked about why he uses vintage documents as his canvas he says “If there’s a headline I want to know a general idea of what’s going on so I can match the drawing.” The amount of details in his art work is intense. And I personally really like the fact that he does this on different types of material because it just makes it all that more interesting to look at.  

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 28, 2018 at 12:31 PM

    "A face that is devoid of a clear emotion gives an ambiguity that is simple and intriguing, it shows the signs in scars of travel and an uncontrolled gaze; a life lived."

    I think this quote is matched in the drawing you posted. Even though I can't see this person's entire face anyway. I think that the ambiguity asks the viewer to read more into what this person is feeling or may have felt in the past. In this case, I'm not focused on the man's wrinkles in particular but moreso on his exposed eye, and what type of feeling that communicates to me.

    It would have been helpful to see more of his work in this post but I'll have to hop on Google.

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  2. Maureen DohertyOctober 16, 2018 at 7:02 PM

    I'm intrigued by the different types of material that Powlle uses in his works and how he tries to unify the materials and the subject. There is also an interesting juxtaposition of the fact that the street uses a relatively cheep and even sometimes undervalued drawing utensil with something that is old and unwanted as newspapers and envelopes. There is an element of the art speaking the truth just in the fact that the materials are so raw and reliable to the storage person. Not always can the average view see the way this paint was applied to a painting, but practically everyone has used a ball point pen to doodle.

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