Mark Renner

Mark Renner: Artist’s Statement

The human characters portrayed in my work share a commonality with much of mankind. Often engaged
in a search for deeper meaning, they are sojourners, agrarian and nomadic, frequently adrift in some
imaginary terrain. Some are downcast, others cast aside. Many are thirsting seekers frantically grasping
for an elusive rest to an inward longing. Largely plebeian, sometimes entangled in the human struggles
and conflicts that come with living, burdened by the problems endemic in their own nature, they are noble
workers, weary workers. Some are driven to wander in a desire for forgetting, some by the hope that lies
beyond their current circumstance. I am drawn to a directness of expression in the unadorned ways and
idioms of humanity.

As a self-taught painter, I have, for decades, pressed hard to develop a personal, visual language. I have
often grasped to convert or transmit the swellings of the inward imagination into a work that would, if
possible, provoke deeper examination. I would balk at the idea of doing so for mere novelty or polemical
reasons. Without being directly illustrative, my work has been prompted or informed by everything from
literary works (e.g., Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress) to personal observation and extensive solitary travel.
Countless volumes of personal sketchbooks accumulated over years (as a composer might carry a
composition book) have also contributed to a body of work tempered by a hunger to distend the life-
affirming.

As an introverted child, I discovered the frisson and pleasure of committing images to paper, and
effectuating scenes of human interaction and living. The impulse to visual response has never
diminished.