Born in Worcester in 1960 Mark Holmes was educated to A level at Worcester Royal Grammar school; upon leaving in 1978 he attended a foundation course in art and design at Worcester Technical College (now Worcester University) before going on to study Fine Art at Cheltenham College of Art and Design, graduating in 1983.
He has always enjoyed painting and drawing but has only recently decided to exploit his skills and to show to a wider audience having taken leave of a long career in local government in 2009.
Early paintings focused on the still life as this tested drawing skills and allowed the artist complete control over the subject and composition. Recent work has taken its references from the local landscape forcing the painter to be more selective regards the elements included and challenging to a greater extent the modelling of depth and space; the use of colour in creating these 'spaces' has always been important.
Working in rural Worcestershire sometimes lends a pastoral quality to later works, but this derives more from an accident in geography than a true nostalgia for the landscape; the artist recognises the importance of and his relationship to the local landscape, but finds that the paintings begin more and more to take reference from themselves and the actual process of painting: in acknowledging this trend he has experimented with a more abstracted view of nature taking as his source tree forms 'dissolved' against brighter backgrounds and pieces where the actual landscapes become sublimated under larger and larger skies. These are very much a work in progress at the moment but Mark would hope to show these works in the future alongside the more traditional pieces.
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Born in Worcester in 1960 Mark Holmes was educated to A level at Worcester Royal Grammar school; upon leaving in 1978 he attended a foundation course in art and design at Worcester Technical College (now Worcester University) before going on to study Fine Art at Cheltenham College of Art and Design, graduating in 1983.
He has always enjoyed painting and drawing but has only recently decided to exploit his skills and to show to a wider audience having taken leave of a long career in local government in 2009.
Early paintings focused on the still life as this tested drawing skills and allowed the artist complete control over the subject and composition. Recent work has taken its references from the local landscape forcing the painter to be more selective regards the elements included and challenging to a greater extent the modelling of depth and space; the use of colour in creating these 'spaces' has always been important.
Working in rural Worcestershire sometimes lends a pastoral quality to later works, but this derives more from an accident in geography than a true nostalgia for the landscape; the artist recognises the importance of and his relationship to the local landscape, but finds that the paintings begin more and more to take reference from themselves and the actual process of painting: in acknowledging this trend he has experimented with a more abstracted view of nature taking as his source tree forms 'dissolved' against brighter backgrounds and pieces where the actual landscapes become sublimated under larger and larger skies. These are very much a work in progress at the moment but Mark would hope to show these works in the future alongside the more traditional pieces.


















