Mark DeLura

Over the years I have come to realize that in it’s core my practice is an attempt, within various modalities, to try and bridge the rupture and distance I feel between my life in the arts, who I am as a person, and the physical world I live in.

I’m frequently wandering in nature; in the woods, by a river, a lake, or the sea. Sometimes I’m in a canoe, but mostly I’m walking in the woods and frequently far from a trail. Often I return to my studio with bones, shells, some rocks or color samples I’ve mixed from life. They are, for me, meaningful points of contact between myself and the places I have wandered through.

Rather than trying to depict or render the life I see and sense all around me, I make small, intuitively constructed, sculptures which often enact healing upon things that have suffered damage or rupture. I use yarn, string and tapes to bind and comfort broken and burnt branches, and rocks that have been shattered. I also lash on sea shells, rocks, feathers, crusts of old dried paint and used paint brushes. I’m seeking, through these works, to bridge the divide between myself, the life of the land I live upon and the culture I live within - a culture which constantly reinforces processes that ignore, deny and objectify all of the former.

Over the years I have come to realize that in it’s core my practice is an attempt to try and bridge the rupture and distance I feel between my life in the arts, who I am as a person and the physical world I live in.

Some of my non-representational paintings have come, through the influence of my sculptures, to resemble devotional objects by incorporating residual elements from my working life along with the bits and pieces of nature I’m constantly bringing into the studio.

I still frequently wander in nature; in the woods, by a river, a lake, or the sea. Sometimes I’m in a canoe, but mostly I’m walking in the woods frequently far from a trail, often returning to my studio with the bones, shells, some rocks I’ve collected or some color samples I’ve mixed from life. They are all, for me, meaningful points of contact between myself and the places I have wandered through.

In 2021 my wife and I purchased our first home. The house itself is modestly proportioned, but it came with a detached garage that I have turned into a studio.

Our move coincided with a change in my figurative paintings that I’ve been continuing to work through as I’ve moved into 2022.

Essentially, the objects and figures I’ve been seeing in my minds eye are still the root of the image, but more and more I am finding that they are in a place that is not simply a painted space. Areas of half tones or “shading” have entered the work too. This has been a time of trial and error. Not many works have made it to a state of completion. Many have been repeatedly scraped down and covered over or thrown out.

Even though my progress in this period has been slow and at times frustrating, I like where the work is going. The nature of the imagery hasn’t really changed, yet I feel I’m moving, along with it, towards a more expansive pictorial engagement.

In 2021, my wife and I purchased our first home. The house itself is modestly proportioned, but it came with a detached garage that I have turned into a studio. This is the first time in our lives together that my studio is not part of our living space.

The landscape surrounding our home is very different from where we were previously living. I found, within the non representational work, that I was now using traditional artist oil paints more often than I had previously. I was trying, through the paintings, to bring myself into sync with the new landscape I was living in. The act of mixing colors with traditional artist oil paints helped to bring me to ground, not only in the individual paintings, but within the new landscape I am living in.

Gradually, the commercial grade paints and odd materials I was using before came back into the work, and grew in scope, without supplanting the traditional oil paints. Now the work feels as if it’s pulling in three directions. Sometimes it’s a transcription of a meditative experience, sometimes it’s a sculptural object, and sometimes it wants to carry remnants of a painterly pictorial space. At times it’s trying to be all three at the same time. At many points there’s friction between these different forms that I do not seek to resolve because the work is clearly still grounded in the landscape and the environment I live in. And, for me that is still a very powerful cord.

I am continuing with my method of painting in acrylic, drawing with black and erasing with white. Over time I am finding that I’m “seeing” with more complexity and am focusing on bringing as much of what I am “seeing” in my minds eye into the paintings.

Also, earlier this year, I began a series of studies from life of various skulls to try and develop a familiarity with them comparable to what I naturally carry in regard to the human figure.

Over the course of these years the images I was seeing were growing more complex. However, I was still not “seeing” anything in color so I continued with my practice of using acrylic paint, drawing my way in with black and erasing with white.

After a year of working to record my imagery on paper using sumi ink and large brushes, I felt the need to start exploring the figures and images I was making, in a way that would make them more of a shared singular and narrative experience. Finding a way of making them more dimensional, less like silhouettes, became a large component in this process.

I was determined that in this work I would only paint what I was seeing in my mind’s eye. In the beginning, and for a long time after, all I saw were singular figures and objects existing on their own. I didn’t see scenery or a setting, or colors. So, working on a larger scale within my home, I shifted to acrylic paint, drawing with black and erasing with white, putting the objects and figures I was seeing onto paper and canvas in the manner I was seeing them.

By 2017 I was experimenting with painting imagery again while simultaneously continuing my involvement with the non-representational work. I was still drawn to particular colors and paints as well as little bits of physical evidence from places that continued to hold meaning for me and that I was still trekking to. However, now, physical mementoes, like leaves from the forest or bits of shells from a beach, also began to find their way into or onto the paintings.

By 2015, identifiable shapes and brushstrokes were starting once again to appear in my non-representational paintings. They were manifesting organically, and they were affecting me on a deep level. Through and because of them I began to see imagery in my mind for the first time in many years.

The images I was seeing were very basic, Paleolithic and iconic, as if they came from a shared collective memory.

I was not sure how to get this imagery onto canvas and was afraid of falling back into old habits. So, my approach to these images was a continuation of my practice with the splot paintings. I purchase sumi ink and large house painter style chip brushes. In the studio I would get as quiet as possible and record images on paper as they came to me. I put them down fast not worrying about proportions or composition, focusing on the image instead of it’s representation. Mostly, these images looked like unrefined silhouettes. Some even reverted to being splots of ink.

My involvement with this work was intense, but the only thing I concerned myself with was putting down on paper something that was unmistakably imagistic without backsliding into old pictorial habits.

In 2008 I stopped making stripe paintings. Vertical stripes had come to feel like a formal device or stylistic concern that I could no longer sustain a relationship with.

It was time to start over again. Once more, I started with mixing colors from direct observation in the landscape. This time however, I had no idea how to put my colors onto canvas.

Instead of the openness and investiture that I sought in my work, it seemed that everything I did for a couple of years unmasked a tendency in me to unwittingly adopt styles and motifs that I did not have a real relationship with. I constantly witnessed myself veering towards pastiche and came to distrust myself, even with something as simple and basic as brushstrokes.

To get past this I purchased large clunky brushes and made my paints very liquid. I wanted to hinder my ability to control the paints and brushes I was using. I focused solely on my involvement with the colors, and the origins of the colors I was using in the paintings. Mostly I would pour some color on a support or jab at it with an overloaded brush and leave it at that.

In 2002 I stripped from my paintings everything I didn’t feel intrinsically or organically connected with. This brought me to a point where all I was left with was the skill of mixing colors from direct observation and the action of applying paint to a support.

I added a third element, which was the time I spent outdoors. I hiked frequently and had developed a close relationship with many places in the local landscape.

I began bringing paints to some of my favorite places in the woods where I would sit patiently and work to quiet my mind. I would mix colors from the points where I noticed my mind and eye settling. I mixed colors by observing things like a leaf with light shining through it or the overall color of distant hills covered in bare trees. I made sample swatches of the colors I mixed, took notes on how I mixed them, where the sun was in relation to me and what the weather was at the time. These color swatches and notes became my way of engaging with the landscape in an intimate way.

In the studio I remixed the colors staying faithful to my samples, my notes and my memories from the location I had mixed the samples in. When I applied these colors to panels or canvas the process was always improvisational; I never set out to capture a place or a specific sense of light. I wanted the paintings to be reflections of the landscapes they came out of and have some of my experiences as a painter and an observer imbedded in them.

Unfortunately, over the years many of these paintings, especially the larger ones, have fallen victim to the hazards of being stored in an over crowded studio or an uninsulated shed.

For a number of years I showed almost exclusively through what evolved into unannounced single day pop-up shows in outdoor locations.

In the beginning these events were so purposefully ephemeral that I refused to document them. I did things like leave small paintings on paper tacked to trees along a trail in the woods or on a community bulletin board in a local shopping plaza. Some paintings disappeared and were clearly taken by whomever had noticed and desired them. Other paintings were ruined by heavy weather.

I stopped leaving paintings for people to find when the scale of the work made it impracticable. This was the point where I began having, and recording, unannounced single day events. I would set-up and photograph the works very early in the morning then sit to one side and make myself available to whomever stopped by.

A surprising variety of people did stop to look closer and often to talk about the work too.  Through these interactions, I came to see that having the paintings in an unusual context loosened people from reflexive responses, opening the possibility of their having an unstructured, thoughtful, and often an enthusiastic engagement with the work.

The photos from the pop-ups that I’m including here are from shows I did in a hay field alongside of Rt. 22 about halfway between Millerton, NY and Copake, NY as well as along the side of a disused milking barn closer to Pine Plains, NY.

Starting in 2017, I broadened what I was doing with the single day pop-up shows by placing images from my paintings in paid advertising space in The New York Review of Books and Chronogram Magazine. Over time I also placed images in the pre show, on screen, advertisements at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, NY and Woodstock, NY. There is no text included with any of the images. This is about using the context to enable the images to be experienced outside of the structures we are used to seeing imagery in. I have been trying to arrest the casual scanning glance and habitual categorizing that I feel is the normal viewing process in print and many other media. By catching people off guard, I’m hoping to foster within a viewer the same kind of free and open engagement that I witnessed during my pop-up events.