PAINTED WORDS

MARC VAN DER MARCK

// Marc is a Dutch photo artist based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Born in Swalmen, he now lives and works in the capital. He has been active as a visual artist for fifty years. We present his very colourful abstract series “Painted Words”.

Marc (and his alter ego Misterbis.marck) considers himself an autodidact. He trained at the photo academy St. Joost, Breda, but then built a career as a freelance copywriter. In the 1970’s and 80’s he combined photography and drawing/painting.

From the mid 1970’s, he exhibited large scale fusions of photographic print and graphite on paper in a number of American museums and galleries, in Munich, Germany, and in Museum Fodor, Amsterdam, his hometown. The works of those years where experimental in nature. He manipulated imagery to twist our perception of things, to demonstrate that seeing is a far cry from comprehending, although it is the necessary first step on a path that may yet mislead us.

“I’m not concerned with art that has already proved its point.”

Marc van der Marck

What draws you to the arts?

“Art is my life: seeing, reading, thinking …”

What do you like best about digital photo art such as the images you have shared with us?

“The intuitive way of making collages and working by chance.“

Around the millennium Marc realized the series “Painted Words”: brightly
painted open books, mounted on rectangular panels, where concept and form have been collapsed. The current photo series reflects these works in random digital collages.

What the viewer is seeing is a colourful arrangement of rectangles, glossy and bold, reminiscent perhaps of the abstract geometric works of modern painters such as Mondrian, Kandinsky, Klee, and several others. We cannot recognise what it is we are looking at.

But for Marc, the rhythmic reiteration expresses the copywriter’s everyday travail, even when text is nowhere in sight.

Click on the photos to see a larger image with its title. Some images may be cropped for layout.