Mark Fine Art

The time has come to present the winning artists and their artwork from the 2023 Spiritual Art Awards international online competition. Nine judges' scores were tallied up to determine the winners.

Congratulations to Mark Johnson of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, for his winning artwork, "A Regarding", in Category 2: Painting - Acrylic or Oil.

Click on the art to see it fully and to read the description. Stay tuned for our winners in the other categories.

Visit the artist's website at https://markfineart.ca

“Waters Surface” graphite 8”x10”

A quietly productive and very cozy Saturday at the Manor. Saturday Caturday FTW 👍🖖

Time for a coffee break. What’s on my easil.

An unknown creep is trying to change my password and has reached out to at least one person on my FB friends list. It’s not me.
I’m adding a pic of the River Thames in London, England because I was just there, and it was very cool to be there.

Listening to Champion “Life is Good” on a Fall afternoon in the studio.

I have a beautiful place to be 66 in 🙂
Thank you everyone for the wishes and good cheer. I love my life :)

Moseying along with my current piece. A closeup.

A handheld selfie. I was heading up the rear deck of the house and noted offhandedly that my reflection, right down to the secondary one I saw from the front window of the house, was a real world manifesting of the way I usually see the world, with my widely varying eyes. Then I had the happy thought of getting my phone and actually taking a picture of it. So there you go.

What’s on my easel.
I played with colour options in the small copies because inventing/redoing colour on the canvas takes a lot of time. It can be fun and organic to go the slow road. Witness the painting “A Regarding“ that I finally finished. The coloured sketches go into a folder with other sketches and reference printouts that became finished works.
The mental image I first had of this current painting grew from a couple of earlier paintings and sketches. My visualizations are usually dynamic, plastic, and too easily spun out of control. I get readily sidetracked imagining the parts as within an ever expanding plenum of possibilities. Too confusing and no focus. I often use reference pictures to corral my mind and bring a visualization to manifestation as a finished artwork.
Here I’ve made a drawing using reference pictures and my other art to guide me. I copied the layout drawing by taping it to a window and lightly tracing it onto a few sheets of paper. I also scaled it up onto an 18”x36” stretched canvas and contoured the first dabs of paint. I like to get a feel for the piece this way before I really dive into it. Then my copies got coloured in while I looked at the canvas.
The thing is, all the parts of the image I mentally have are all changeable colours, and they flow in and around and over and through all the other parts and colours. It is dreamlike in a way. Nailing down broad areas of the sketched in painting with a first wash of ballpark colours saves buckets of time.

Thank you Dimitri Levenoff of ImageFoundry here in Toronto. These are his digitized scans of my paintings.
“Chrysalis Grove 24”x36”
“A Regarding” 30”x40”
They’re both acrylic paint on canvas.

The view of downtown Toronto from my brother’s Lakeshore West place. A lovely day and a strong showing of siblings - 5 out of 6, and the missing one sent their firstborn to represent. Thanks brother Dan, I’m only sorry my Lady isn’t retired and was therefore absent.

“A Regarding” is done, now to get it properly digitized by - acrylic on canvas, 30”x40”
Everything starts from energy. Over a span of Deep Time energy becomes nuanced enough, and coagulated enough, to become matter and eventually life. The vibrations life generates modulate the universe and when the vibrations of life become sophisticated enough, life starts creating entirely new and unexpected dimensions. Self aware life engages the universe with purpose causing a Dimensional Blooming. Dimensions such as emotion, music, visual art and dance, mathematics and all the other constructs people generate come into being as dimensions ephemeral or long-lasting.

The Furry Fellows are glad we’re home after 2 weeks out of country. Our house sitters apparently got lots of love while we were away. But the boys sure seem ready for the lap time they’ve grown up with. # caturday

I finished off a 8.5”x11” sketchbook today, so I sprayed a bit of fixative on the pages and ran it through a scanner. Pencil and colour pencil.

“The Snail’s Dream” in colour pencils.

I’m a very proud recipient of the Spiritual Art Awards 2022 for 2-D work Painting. This international award is for my painting “Surfacing”. The actual physical award itself is a beautiful piece of glass art. Many thanks to the Awards founder Carolyn Quan & the judges for this honour

Howdy from the studio. Deep dive into the piece behind me :)

My painting “Surfacing” got an award :)

Packing up for the day because it’s getting dark out. I wondered what the work looks like white a light shining from the back. So here it is. The WIP, Backside.

Transition Weave - Is the universe infinite? How about infinity as a thing, does it exist? I’m thinking that “infinity” is a wonderful human thought tool. It has great value, and opens up all sorts of nuances and possibilities for thought. Infinity is related in this way to other useful ideas like “zero”, or “time”.
I think it’s easier to say the universe is pervasive. It’s all right here, all of it, every bit, RFN. Especially what we are congenitally unable to perceive. Or conceive. We’re all in it. And it’s in all of us. Like waves are in and of the water, everywhere, all over, all at once and the same time. Always.

I’m sitting back, engaged in a conversation with “Regard”, this interminable WIP I’m spending my time with. There’s a light rain on the studio roof. It’s Remembrance Day, a day to reflect on my Dad and his life. It’s my son’s 38th birthday. Lots of threads to ponder while sipping a cozy coffee.

This WIP won’t be done for the weekend, but I’m showing it anyway. The Bayview Art Tour Fall 2022 is on Saturday and Sunday, and I’m taking part. My tent and deck, studio and Urban Oasis will have my original unique art to share. I’m putting small knick knacks among the stones and plants to catch the eye of the junior set when local families drop by. Message me if you want any particulars.

On my easel. Work in Progress

I’m looking out the screened window, through some trees at the yard behind my studio. I focused to see the scene through the fine black of the mesh of the screen. Then shifting my focus through the trees and a kaleidoscope of colour and light and movement, to a deck - noting the grid dissolve out of view as my focus steps past shadow box changes in depth of field. Everything I see is a dynamic puzzle of shape and colour, changing yet held in place because of the simple reality that I am looking at a yard and trees through a window.
It’s a powerful thing, the fluid flow of the minds eye as I effortlessly edit out foreground details, window screens and tree branches, to see what’s behind it all.
I had an image of someone considering bolts of coloured cloth while envisioning the striking dresses they could create. In a way it’s how I often flip through perceptions of what I see, wondering at all the ways I’m not seeing. Like dancing through different mental visions distilled from all the realities I try to see.

Also, a happy-snap of my current Work in Progress 24”x36” acrylic on canvas. It will hang in booth B 198 at the Toronto Outdoor Art Festival in a couple of weeks.

W.I.P. in the studio. I’ve been putting in studio time, seeing if my paintings are willing to cooperate. Some days they do and some days it’s just time going by. It’s a good thing I love my life, eh.
                        

Frou frou trim from my Lady’s hair person. Many more cuts like this, and all the coloured hair I have left will wind up on the salon floor, leaving behind nothing but silver and white locks.

What a lovely day. Suffering for my art is pretty easy when Mother Nature is showing us her love 👍