Mark Hearld's Individual Style

Well I said that I was going to be writing about some artist that I love and this (I hope!) will be the first of many!

Recently I discovered the work of Mark Hearld. Born in 1974, Mark studied illustration at Glasgow College of Art and then completed an MA in Natural History Illustration at the Royal College of Art. His work directly reflects this extended and specific education.

Mark Hearld’s art works combines his individual style of collage, printmaking and mark making. His compositions also reflect his distinctive style.

Many of his images are created by building up layers. Firstly collage, secondly mark making and finally a linocut. The last layer, the linocut, feels like a seal on the image or a stamp of approval.  Perhaps this helps him to stop playing with an image any longer, and to complete it, an issue I have with my our own work from time to time. As a body of work, he mixes linocuts with his own pattern making. The use of repeated patterns is a constant theme throughout his work. He uses both marks and collage to make an image appear patterned and textured. Although he does not draw each feather individually on the owl, the pattern gives the impression of being very detailed.

 

His love of nature and all things natural is not only expressed in his subject matter, but it expands into his mark making and the patterns used in his images. This makes all of his images unique and very distinctive. His love of nature may also link to why His work is exclusively hand generated and he does not use programs such as Illustrator or Photoshop to enrich his work. Therefore his work has a tendency to look flat and not very three-dimensional, this is very clear in the body of the bird and the chest and face are very flat, however the wings are richly textured. We see an alternative method Hearld uses to add a third dimension to otherwise very flat images. 

As a young artist his work is bound to grow, expand and change and he may in later work start to use computer programs to enrich his style. However, I almost hope he doesn't; I hope he sticks to what he knows, because we are in danger of all graphic design becoming computerised and people forgetting about beautiful hand rendered techniques such as printmaking and painting. 

I love his work and how free each individual artwork feels, in both pattern and collage. I have added some of my own work at the end of this post, all have been inspired by Hearld's work, especially his 3D birds and I hope to be adding more things in the future to this blog in the same style!