Born 1957, Houston, Texas

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

 

 

Allen began his training early with his artist father. He received a bachelor’s degree in commercial art at Texas State University inSan Marcos, and later he continued his studies at Parson’s School of Design in New York City. He opened his first studio in an artist co-op where he had his first shows at the gallery “Designers Space” in Austin, TX. Painting soon became an obsession for him. In the late 80’s, Mark moved to Los Angeles and studied further at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He began using typography in his paintings and exploring scale with billboard size canvases. He served as Vice President of development in the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Los Angeles Chapter. He travelled to Europe in the early 1990’s to see the great art at world class museums. Upon returning, Allen began creating artwork on a daily basis. He rented an apartment in New York City and went back and forth from West coast to East coast eventually establishing himself with several galleries, including the Goldstrom Gallery in New York City.

 

 

Mark Andrew Allen Statement

 

 

"When explaining my paintings to someone that has never seen them before, I like to say that my work is similar to riding a bicycle on the busy beach path in Venice, California. You see a lot of different imagery and hear snipets of conversation whizzing by you a second or two at a time. Just a sentence or two as you pass by. I incorporate that concept into my work. We are constantly bombarded everyday with images and words. Every second, there is a new email, a text message, an interesting commercial, a new song on the radio, a bird singing out the window, a loud garbage truck. All of this makes up the reality of our day-to-day lives. I edit that and incorporate them into my work. A lot of the imagery I choose harks back to childhood memories of feeling safe, carefree, and happy which is welcome in these uncertain times. If it feels good for one reason or another, I know I have the right picture.

 

Each work is an additive process that involves one central large image, then a secondary mid-size image and a third smaller image,establishing a formal balance, therefore allowing me to layer complexities of distractions. 

Some of the complexities carry over from piece to piece. For example, I have added a 'Baldessari' dot with drips to many works as a nod to the California artist. The smaller colorful dots on some of the pieces are a nod to UK artist Damien Hirst's dot paintings. The typography nods to Ed Ruscha and Stuart Davis and my own extensive typography background creating lettering and fonts for fortune 500 companies around the globe. The mixed media of 'found objects' and pop art is a nod to Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and Warhol, all of whom I have met. The drips are a nod to the 'New York School Action Painters' of the Fifties, mainly Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and DeKooning. The 'push and pull' of the colors contrasting each other is also a nod to DeKooning and Gorky. The checkerboard pattern is a nod to Kandinsky. Other important influences include Larry Rivers, Jim Dine, Christo, Frank Gehry, Ed Moses, Nancy Keinholtz ( I have met all of them), James Rosenquiest, Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell, Richard Diebenkorn, Chris Burden, Nancy Rubins, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, and above all Picasso.

 

I like to overlay the multicolor squares that I refer to as 'pixels' on each piece to represent the annoying pixels we get on our TV when we are trying to watch our favourite TV shows. We pay a ton of money for our cable and still get these damn pixels. I thought, why not let that concept creep into my work and let the 'pixels' sometimes block out important information. Also a roundabout nod to cubism and Picasso whom I spent six years studying.

 

It all brings the work to real time. Each one of my works strives to represent what it is like to live today. The most important job of an artist is to represent the time of which he lives."