Notes From The City: An Abundant Life

I met the amazing Artist Mark Finne last year at an Artist talk at Novado Gallery, but I'd known his name and his work for at least a year before we met. I had seen his work at 660 Studios when I met with John Fathom, the Art Director there for a blog post, and John had shown me the work of the other artists who were part of that awesome space. When I met Mark at the Artist talk and introduced myself, I told him that I had written about John and 660 and that I'd like to write about him also, but it took us another year to run into each other and finally make an appointment to sit down and talk about his work. Before we met for this blog, he invited me to an event at Acuworx, an Acupunture and wellness space in Jersey City, and that evening turned out to be a highlight not just because of the lovely space and Mark's beautiful artwork, but because Mark has so many wonderful friends who filled the space with great food, great wine, great music and great conversation. And added to that was the fact that several of the people who walked into the room were people who I already knew and liked, and as Mark and I chatted a bit that night before the room became too filled with the party, we discovered that for a few years a number of years ago he had worked in a space in the ground floor of the building in SoHo I lived in. It was in that building that I began to put together events with Artists and Designers, and it was during that time that I began to produce Off-Off Broadway theater. It was while I was living there that I met and became a model for the Couture Clothing Designer Jean Paul Knott, and it was where I began to write plays and screenplays, short stories and poetry, and where so much of my creative life began to take a new direction. On the night of Mark's event at Acuworx I felt like my past was meeting my present on an adventure to the future in some kind of miraculous way, with so many good friends in the room and someone who in a way knew my history and some of the things that have brought me where I am today.

Mark himself is a catalyst for creativity - I had written last year about the time when he had called up the Artist Anthony Boone to begin a collaboration at a time when Anthony had stopped painting for a while, and how it was because of that call that Anthony started painting again. If you ask any Artist who knows Mark, and it seems he knows just about everyone or is known about by everyone, you'll only hear good things. He is well respected as an Artist and as a person, and he is known to be someone who is well liked, well thought of and admired. There is also a very joyful side to Mark, with names on his paintings that are plays on words and 3-D images created in a very secret process for canvases that are beautiful on their own but that come to glorious life when we are wearing Chromadepth 3-D glasses. Having spent time under water as a diver, Mark began to create these beautifully immersive images after seeing a show at Hayden Planetarium, and he continues to explore the boundaries of what he can do and how the eye will perceive the work, always with a sense of the wonder he feels under water or looking through the water to the depths below or from the depths to the world above, and the desire to bring the visions he experiences to the light of day.

On the afternoon we shared together, first at Hamilton Square where he has a current show and then across the street for a delicious lunch that stretched into dinner at Rumba Cubana, we talked about everything under the sun and then some. It turns out that our paths have crossed several times over the years, all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and the places where we have both gone without knowing each other at all are very special places that not everyone goes to. It's almost as if we had some kind of tracking device that followed each other all over the map but that somehow kept us from ever meeting until that Artist talk last year. There is a perfect timing to everything, and having met Mark now seemed the perfect time to begin to explore and understand his work. In addition to the mysterious and intricate method he has of creating the 3-D images, he also has been exploring using fabric with patterns within the paintings to create a physical change of depths and layering. He is a photographer too, and his images are stunning. Some of them he has mounted on metal, a technique that I've always been partial to since I first saw it done by the Belgian Artist and Photographer Jean Claude Wouters who I also met in those days when I lived in SoHo, and whose work I helped introduce to New York City.

During the afternoon we also laughed alot and I discovered his love for playing with language, something that brought back memories of my brothers who used to always find names for people and things that were different from the names that anyone else would give them, names that to this day make me laugh out loud when I think of them or hear them. There is a lightness around Mark that is combined with his depth of vision and understanding of the fine art pieces he creates that seems a reflection and combination of the depth of the waters he dives in with the buoyancy of the salt water of the vast oceans. There is a sincerity and a seriousness of someone who is committed to creating beautiful and excellent work and a person who we can feel comfortable and safe with, but within and around that seriousness a lightness of being arrives that brings joy, laughter and fun to every situation. His art is unique - there is nothing that I've ever seen that it reminds me of. The use of color, the nuances of shading in the monochrome pieces and the multi layers created by paint, and in some cases the addition of fabric, create a feeling of peace and calm while bringing a feeling of exhilaration. They are transporting in the best way, taking us into a part of the world that we haven't seen because it's the part that is the unique vision of the Artist Mark Finne.

Mark Finne
"See Saw: Paintings Inspired
From Adventures Below & Above
The Surfaces Of Our Oceans & Seas"

At Hamilton Square

232 Pavonia Avenue

Jersey City, New Jersey

https://silvermanbuilding.com/building/hamilton-square/

http://www.jcartist.org/markfinne

https://www.facebook.com/mark.finne.9

Below In Belize 2018

Photo On Metal