Mark Boedges

Artist Statement

While I paint many different kinds of subjects, the landscape is my first and greatest love. Like many artists, I strive to achieve a painterly realism in my work. I do this for good reason. In an age when all manner of visual media are easily produced and propagated, a well-crafted painting has one clear advantage: it has a real, tactile surface. Depth is not just an illusion of pixels but a real quality of pigments layered and “smooshed” around a canvas. So I attempt to let the paint do what it does best: look like paint. Exactly how painterly to make it is a question for each painting, and is dictated by the subject at hand and what about it I wish to capture. And since I mostly work outdoors, I should mention that weather, that simple and unalterable force of nature, shapes a great part of what I do and how I do it.