About

I'm Mark Jeffreys, an artist from the UK now living in the Netherlands. I grew up in the Cotswolds and lived in London for many years.

I travelled from the city to the country and back, a lot. The more I did, the more I thought about the separation between urban and rural land-scapes. The definitions of space and environment are important to my work. (Even when landscape is represented by a picture on a postcard, it possesses more landscape than would first appear once sent.) Land-scapes are a multitude of interconnected spaces.

Oil paint has a depth of colour that I enjoy exploring as a vital part of the image-making process. The physical attributes of the painted surface might be seen as analogue to scaped land. If a frame is used it imposes structure, like the edges of paths and causeways or hedgerows or roads as borders; if it is not, this space floats free.

By challenging assumptions related to painting I find a space to simultaneously explore ideas about what landscape is. 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 spaces places and feelings.

For the past few years I've lived in the Netherlands. This 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.

This is climate anxiety, which my work in part provides an outlet for.