About

Welcome to my site. Thanks for visiting.

I'm Mark Jeffreys, a British artist living in the Netherlands. I grew up in the Cotswolds, England, spent some time in Norfolk, then Oxfordshire, and by my early twenties the gravity of London pulled me in, its attraction felt the first time I visited the National Gallery in my teens, along with the intoxicating diversity and broader creative scene of a big city.

The contrast of the urban and the rural as I traveled back and forth between family and friends made me think more and more about these two different spaces, how we see landscape and what it means when it is seen as a multitude of interconnected ecologies instead of something seen on the front of a postcard (although by the same logic that postcard has more landscape in it than would first appear, especially when sent). My landscape includes my internal landscape, my thoughts and actions in relation to my environment. Through this lens I recover remnants of being somewhere, seen through a haze of past encounters with places and spaces and feelings.

I work with a mix of materials but most often paint on paper or canvas. I see paintings as windows into mimicked spaces but the physical surface, with its pitted texture and brush mark interventions, could be seen as the analog of scaped lands. The structure of the frame - if one is used - and boundaries imposed by it have more in common with urban hardness, but its rules and regulations can be bent or broken without repurcussion, aside from potential feelings of frustration through failure.

I enjoy using oils the most; they have a depth of colour that is fun to explore as a vital part of the image-making process.  I sometimes also create digital variants of paintings using computer software for further experimentation. By challenging assumptions related to painting I find a space to simultaneously explore ideas about what landscape can be.

For the past few years I have lived in the Netherlands, which brings its own influences into my work as I consider the ever-present proximity of water and the strange feeling that wherever I stand, a least in the area of Amsterdam, I'm likely standing below sea level and should be underwater, lost in a losing landscape.