10 Questions with Mark Walters

Mark Louis Walters is an American-born artist, designer, and art director. His paintings are in private collections around the United States, and his work in film, television, theater, video games, and theme parks has been enjoyed by millions worldwide.

Mark was born in Ohio, the fourth son of Mary and Jack Walters, a musician and engineer, respectively. Although he was performing music and theater at a very young age, as well as studying painting from the age of six, his burning ambition in life was to be a fighter pilot. This culminated in Mark obtaining his pilot’s license at the age of seventeen and an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis to pursue his dream of becoming a naval aviator. However, an injury sustained from participating in boxing left him unfit for pilot training, and he had to resign from the Academy. He decided to switch directions and pursue a career in the arts, in which he had always excelled. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture from the University of Nevada- Las Vegas.

Mark paints grand theatrical works that juxtapose found images, words, and occasionally found objects. His pieces play with multiple meanings of images and words, often incorporating humor or slang definitions. His paintings are frequently completed with sculptural frames he creates to extend both the picture plane itself as well as the possible narrative meanings. Some of his works are very large, with figures at life size scale or greater.

He has had exhibitions in Las Vegas at Markus Galleries and Allied Arts, as well as open studio shows in Los Angeles. He was part of Disarming Images; a traveling shows about nuclear disarmament that toured throughout the United States.

Mark has worked as a motion picture art director for nearly thirty years and has designed or art-directed projects for nearly all of the major studios, including Paramount, Warner Brothers, and Disney. His work includes major properties such as Transformers and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as hit television shows. He also has credits as a video game writer for Activision on titles for Marvel and Dreamworks.

Among Mark’s many awards are three nominations for Excellence in Production Design by the Art Directors Guild, a Themed Entertainment Award for attraction design, and various awards from regional theater. His artwork has received prizes from juried shows, such as two awards from ‘Art Affair’ in Las Vegas.

Mark now resides with his family in San Quirico d’Orcia in the province of Siena in Tuscany, Italy.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Mark Walters paints grand theatrical works which juxtapose found images, words, and occasionally found objects. His works play with multiple meanings or narratives, often incorporating humor or slang definitions. The pieces might be completed with sculptural frames that extend and define the picture plane as well as contribute to the work’s narrative.

Working mostly in acrylic and solid oil, Mark’s works are mostly figurative. Executed in a style devoid of brushstrokes, the found images are not reproduced but rather rendered in a way that evokes many meanings beyond the initial impression of the original photographs or advertisements. He carefully constructs these pieces to open many narrative possibilities that are then completed by the viewers’ bias towards the imagery or language. Mark’s work explores the notion of modern visual mythology.

INTERVIEW

What kind of education or training helped you develop your skillset?

My mother, a musician, had me enrolled in a private painting class by the age of eight. I also took music lessons with my mom and other teachers from the age of four until I was eighteen. The arts were encouraged in our house. I even did a bit of professional acting as a kid. So my training started quite early.
I later received an MFA in sculpture from the University of Nevada- Las Vegas. (This was after my military career came to an abrupt end due to complications from a boxing injury.) My training in my degree was highly technical and gave me the skills to make pretty much anything I could conceive in my mind. While at university, I did a semester abroad in Florence, Italy, which had a profound influence on my work. The concepts behind my current work started to form there as I was exposed to the history of iconography, Gothic and Renaissance works, and more.
After graduation, I worked at an art gallery that carried Warhol, Moore, Ernst, Cutrone, and others, and that gave me a solid base in what being a professional artist means. At the same time, I was doing a lot of work in the theater as a painter, doing large backdrops and so forth. That eventually led to my career as an art director in cinema. I developed drafting, digital, and design skills through my film work, and those skill sets have become a big part of the way I execute my paintings. I think for anyone, the process of making art conglomerates into a unique set of skills for a working artist.
I would also point out that life experiences have shaped my work as much as anything. I never intended to be a professional artist. I was determined from a very early age to be a fighter pilot, but I enjoyed the arts so much, and they were such a part of my family that I was always involved in artistic endeavors. However, I pursued the fighter pilot dream, getting a pilot's license when I was a teenager and getting an appointment at the United States Naval Academy. I was a top student (midshipman) there but suffered a complex head injury from boxing, and that ended my military career before I was commissioned or entered flight training. But, my pursuit of that childhood dream made me realize that we all create a sort of personal mythology which guides our individual lives. We often pursue ideals or organize our lives around ideals rather than physical needs. So, my technical skillset came from school and work experience, and my conceptual skillset came from personal life experiences.

How did you start making art? And how would you define yourself as an artist?

I have always made art. The works I make now started to take shape around thirty-five years ago when I was working at Markus Galleries in Las Vegas, and we carried pop artists like Andy Warhol and Ronnie Cutrone. From my student experience in Italy, I was already fascinated by the idea of icons being a gateway to myth. The pop 'tradition' of working with found images and objects really took hold with me around that time. In 1988, I did a large-scale work I called 'No Choice', which was a two-panel work in which one panel had three images stacked: troops on a German tank in WWII, the 'little boy' nuclear bomb, and an image of a passenger pigeon being released from a little porthole on a WWI tank. Next to this was a larger panel that was a greatly enlarged image of the label from a little restaurant packet of mixed fruit jelly. The images were rendered realistically but with acidic colors, while the jelly label was a fairly accurate representation, though almost two meters tall! This piece won a juried prize, and I have continued to develop my work along these lines ever since.
So I would define myself as a pop artist, but my works are very theatrical in nature, and the way in which they imply narratives is very important. Perhaps I am a theater and film artist (a storyteller) who makes pop art.

What is your creative process like? Do you ever experience creative blocks?

My works usually begin with a number of related narratives on some subject. I see multiple meanings in words, images, history, language, and more, and that is usually where I begin. Then I search for images and objects that can be combined, often with words, in a way that will illicit a narrative from the viewer based on their own biases.
After I have found a number of images that might be combined to convey my idea, I usually draft the piece as both a study and a construction drawing. I nearly always do this digitally now using a CAD program and other software. This allows me to work out the precise scale and composition of everything in the work, including how it might be framed, as I often make frames that add to the iconography within the work. Scale is very important in my work in the sense of things being tiny and precious or monumental and overwhelming to the viewer. I am particularly interested in a human form being rendered larger, equal, or smaller than life, as that changes how the viewer sees that human figure in the painting. Once this digital file is complete, I am ready to execute the work.

I nearly always project my digital file onto the painting surface so that the initial layout will be exactly the same as the drawing. I sketch a cartouche with paint on all of the panels or canvases, which will make up the finished piece. Then I never look at my digital drawing again.
Once I begin to paint, I work from light to dark across a pictorial object or shape, maintaining a wet edge so that I can mix all the colors directly on the canvas. I never mix on a palette. I work and drive the paint into the surface to achieve the desired blending and transitions of color I desire and, in so doing, eliminate brushstrokes, which is similar to traditional iconography in that the egg tempura used in most ancient works really did not allow for the quick gesture or 'hand' of the artist.
When painting, I don't really concern myself with any particular realism. Instead, I am really concentrating on making a surface of color. My hope is that any little fragment of my work would still function as a composition, primarily through the movement of color. I think that is part of what I take from Renaissance art - the jewel-like surface of color. It is not about the gesture of the brushstroke but rather the relationships of colors and forms. This is not to say my work is not realistic. It certainly is, as I am striving to create icons that will evoke narratives.
I never have creative blocks. Once my work matured into what it is now, I am never at a loss as to what to paint or how to paint it. I try to work everything out in the digital phase so I can just paint freely. A few times, however, a painting may not be working out. I destroyed a piece recently that I had worked and worked and worked. I had even completed a very complex frame for it with molded objects and so forth - months and months of work, really. Realizing it was just not going to work, cutting it off the stretcher bars and tossing it in the trash was very liberating.

You work with found images and objects. How do you incorporate them into your work? And what messages would you like to convey with this practice?

I look at found images as modern icons or something I can transform into an icon. I mean, Marilyn Monroe is not actually famous for being the particular person she was, but rather pictures of her are what is famous. In fact, they are modern icons. Often I use multiple images combined to add up to something more than the sum of the parts. These images are carefully constructed to imply multiple meanings. The meanings that I envision come from pop culture, historical references, current events, and more. I see all of these different meanings at once, and my desire is that the viewer will discover them and, in so doing, discover their own biases and even prejudices. As an example, in my piece,' Right,' I painted a portrait of an old, white businessman placed above the word 'right' in a bold style of font. To me, this patriarch can represent much of what is wrong in the world: privilege, self-righteousness, inequality, conservative ignorance, and more. If the viewer looks at it and thinks, 'that man is right,' well then they might be biased to favor a right-wing or maybe even racist point of view. Or they might see it as ironic, or even a protest against the right wing, or even the exact opposite - a celebration of the right. It is surrounded by a frame with inlaid nickels and dimes, which might imply the phrase, 'nickel and dimed to death.' I constructed the piece to include all of these concepts at once so that the viewer is forced to have some sort of dialogue with the work. There is no correct answer. That is the point. The world is shades of gray - not stark black and white. The world is made of contradictions and multiplicities, and that is where I like my work to be.

What role does the artist have in society, in your opinion?

The artist is a yardstick for the time and culture in which the artist lives. Art is a means of measure of a society. I have a bit of a sense of duty to fulfill this role and reflect the psyche of the world at this moment in time. I am trying to make markers or signposts of what humanity is thinking and doing now. What is this age we are living in going to be called in a few centuries? It is the art left behind that will define it.

What do you see as the strengths of your work, visually or conceptually?

I think the narrative or theatrical aspect of my work is its greatest strength. I am fascinated by what motivates extreme behavior in our society. It seems to me that, more often than not, people will share what they have to help others with basic needs. But that same person might be capable of heinous acts in pursuit of an idea. People share food, clothing, and shelter but will kill, invade, torture, and all the rest over religion, nation, or group identity. Those concepts are nothing more than a myth. Sure, there are languages and cultures and tribes that are distinct, but these aspects of life lead to ideas that are nothing but constructs of the mind and reside only there - in thought. They are only made manifest through complex artificial constructs such as the church or nation/state. I try to make works that poke at that sore spot of myth by using the viewer's bias to provoke a narrative to them that might make them confront these biases that might be subconscious and overlooked. I often use a bit of humor to sort of disarm the viewer a bit to draw them in and then find other meanings. Not everything I do is this pointed. Many works just play with the double meanings of words and images because of pop culture, slang, and so forth, like the fact the word 'brief' can mean a legal document, something of short length, or men's underwear.

Where do you find inspiration? And how do you engage with your network?

I find inspiration in nearly everything. But I suppose what inspires me most are images that I find that can transcend into a sort of iconography. And by iconography, I mean it literally, like how portraits function in Byzantine art or religious art from the Gothic and Renaissance periods. My work often has gold leaf fields for backgrounds and so forth to imitate those traditional icons. So I am inspired by images that can carry a context that will make the image function as an icon. These are usually images in which the subject of the image: person, place, or thing can represent something more than the subject itself. The image can become an icon for an idea or concept from our current society.
In terms of engaging with my network, I have to say that I am hoping to expand it as I have recently moved to Europe. I recently developed a website (marklwalters.com) that promotes my film work, and I am now putting together the same thing for my paintings. I am also on Instagram at mlwfineart. I have to mention that putting my work on the web is a little bit worrisome to me due to the potential for piracy. Maybe that is because of working on so many films and shows and seeing all those warnings before the movie starts. I copyright all of my work, and I strongly recommend this to all artists!

You already have a long and successful career. What do you think of the art market? And what would you expect from it?

Today's art market has many more venues in which to do business than in the past. Sadly, it remains as much of a free for all as it always has been. It is interesting to think that my film work is dependent on massive corporations, and it requires that I am protected by my union (the Art Directors Guild), yet that very inflexible structure actually makes it much easier to deal with, at least for me. The art market is just something you have to find your own way in, kind of like being lost in a jungle. In terms of expectations, I really do not have any concrete things I expect to happen. I just want to grow my exposure so that I can grow my market. My hope is to sell works to more private collections and to break into institutional collections as well. 

You are currently living in the Tuscan countryside. How does it influence your work? 

The Tuscan countryside itself does not influence my work too much visually, but being in Italy and being surrounded by the great Renaissance and Classical works certainly influences my work immensely. I am really drawn to the compositions, the function, and even the technical methods of these treasures. I mean, my work is all about creating a sort of modern iconography, so what better place to be than where the Gothic icon transformed into Renaissance humanism? I think the birth of the modern world happened in Tuscany in the Fifteenth century, and it is all there in the art. Tuscany is just a great place to be as an artist.

What are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future? Anything exciting you can tell us about?

I have some large, major works in development that I have been thinking about for a very long time. These are pieces that closely imitate the composition and structure of Gothic altarpieces. Also, I'm doing a series of smaller pieces working with humorous double meanings as well as a series of pieces I'm just starting to put together about contronyms - words that have two meanings that are actually opposite, like 'citation,' which can be a document issued as an award or a document issued as a punishment. Life is just full of contradictions.