Key ideas inform my work: observation, contemplation, collaboration, craft and concept; within a posture of vulnerability, tears, prayer and sacrifice.
A Montreal based artist with a background in writing and teaching,
Mark Philip Venema works in drawing, printmaking, painting and photography along with new media. He has recently graduated from Concordia University with a Masters of Fine Arts in Studio Art, at Montreal, Quebec, Canada.Chronology of work
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Figure studies from live model, drawing 2008.
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“Transforming Spaces:
Vacuum-formed Plastic as Diorama”
Photography, 2007.
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“Archives of Innocence: a collaboration with my daughters.”
Photography with letterpress, 2006.
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“Inside out consumer: Self-portraits from within”
Photography and sculpture in paper, 2005.
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Portraits in printmaking;
from 2003 to 2005.
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We spent the winter travelling in Italy, Spain and Portugal, my wife and I pushing our three daughters in strollers observing, gaping at, endless rooms of artwork in palazzos. The girls put up with it, looked at Botticelli's work, made benches in the galleries into playgrounds, and we pushed. After weeks of this I began to suffer from an aberration of the Stendhal syndrome, I wept and uttered glossalalia before Renaissance masterpieces.
In particular were images of Christ's descent from the cross or “depositions”: Pontormo's in Santa Felicita, Florence; Rosso Fiorentino's in Volterra; Quentin Metsys' in Lisbon, Bellini's Pieta in Venice and then finally, I nearly broke down covering my face before the deposition by Roger Van der Weyden at del Prado in Madrid. I became ill, went to the hospital for chest pains in Lisbon, had various electro-cardiograms.
Whether I am a fanatic who admires the iconoclasm of Savonarola or a mystic who swoons before the contorted figures of El Greco or a humanist who revels in the “divine” Michelangelo, one thing is for certain, Simon Schama is on to something about the power of art: “paint paint, blood blood, get it?”
The experience of observing and contemplating “Art” should not be a pleasant afternoon visit to a local gallery; it should on some level be an encounter with the divine; it should lead to violent introspection, tears of repentance, cries of joy; “Art” should mess with your soul and spirit, creating a discomfort with things as they are; it should do no less than make you see the world anew.
~ Mark Philip Venema, March 2009, Montreal.
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