Mark Risius

About Mark

Mark Risius is a multi passionate creative and has been proficient in various creative endeavors throughout his life. Art was his first creative outlet throughout grade school with a particular love of drawing cats and kittens with pencil. Other creative outlets are music, writing, performance poetry and improv comedy.

Mark continued with music and art into early twenties and at that time began painting on sandstone. This is a style he calls Lucid Naturalism as the pieces remind him of the intense vibrancy and color of a lucid dream or the world seen through the lens of particularly potent hallucinogens (of which his participation thereof can neither be confirmed nor denied). The subject of these Lucid Naturalism Sandstone pieces were usually composed of a stark white leafless birch/aspen tree, their trunks dividing into hundreds of intricate wind blown branches over a moonlit sunrise sky silhouetted with cliffs, mesas and spires.

While Mark loved the final product of the Sandstone pieces the execution was “as tedious as doing taxes by candle light” catalyzing him to try something that would be the exact opposite: abstract painting. Mark’s next step was to go big, really big at 60” x 96”. At this size a smoothly blended abstract painting was fun to create with long broad blending brush strokes that were much more fun than tedious tiny branches. These are a style Mark calls Soulscapes. “If New Age music were art, it would look like this.”

Later, Mark had the urge to do something more constructive with his art- and so was born the idea of cutting up paintings into strips and remounting these over one of his custom made frames and so was born The Woven Collection. The Woven Collection is a wholly unique style of oils on canvas that exists nowhere else in the world. Mark has developed this Woven Collection into circular and oval shapes and is always in the process of exploring other shapes and compositions.

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Website: www.markrisius.com

Email: markrisius@gmail.com