Mark Dunford studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, between 1982-1987 and has been a member of The London Group since 2001. Throughout his career he has exhibited regularly at a number of noted London galleries including Dulwich Picture Gallery, The Mall Galleries, the Barbican and Whitechapel Art Galleries, Leighton House and Felix & Spear. He has also exhibited at several galleries throughout the UK including The Royal Museum, Canterbury; Southampton City Art Gallery; Millennium, St Ives and Penlee House, Cornwall; as well as exhibiting in Europe at the Pulchri Studio, The Hague, the Mirror Gallery, Vicenza, Italy and the University of Wisconsin, USA. Mark has been awarded several scholarships and prizes including the Robert Ross Scholarship, UCL; the Richard Ford Award from the Royal Academy of Art to study in Madrid and the Winsor & Newton Young Artists’ Award, in conjunction with the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colour.

Celebrating the visual tension between surface and space, Mark locates and realises his pictures using grid lines and visible reworking. Mark places the presence of his works firmly with the composition of his subjects and their relationship to the space around them. His influences range from Cézanne Piero della Francesca, Constable, Chardin, Seurat; continuing a direct line from the teaching of Euan Uglow, William Coldstream, Howard Brown, Norman Norris and Patrick George.

Mark’s combined palette of muted and saturated colour provides the onlooker with an awareness of his hand and process in building 3D space on a 2D surface.

 

When describing his approach to painting Mark states:

“My primary concerns are looking by drawing and using colour in a ‘specific way’. I try to understand how ‘things’ appear by building relationships of colour, scale and shape that make ‘contact’ with the intangible and ever changing appearances. Colour may be used in different ways; it might be copied or adjusted to work. I am driven by how beautiful something looks, trying to balance observation, invention and imagination.”