Mark Bowers

b. 1977 St. Joseph, MI

Mark Bowers work consists of small-scale highly detailed landscape paintings. They are inspired by the comfort, trepidation, and beauty found in the mundane Chicago Suburban existence. He combines nature, decorative housewares, municipal structures, and personal artifacts to hint at current life and future implications in the orchestration of these elements. Each work in the series is a portrait of a search for markers on a journey, an attempt to learn from what is palpable and to appreciate the intangible. The paintings are meant to suggest the truth in the unidealized moment--the actual truth only exists off the edges of the canvas, off stage, and in the experience of the viewer. Drawing the objects in these paintings is like positioning characters on stage in a play, each adding to the dramatization. For example, the sky’s ‘role’ embodies a duality of expansive hopefulness and luminous foreshadowing; smoke is the symbol for the unknown, while water towers denote conjured romantic outcomes, as shadows lure the impractical. His paintings embody the background and visual noise of an anxiety within the consolation of present day living.