focus on mark welsh

Shell Company by Mark Welsh| Oil on Board | 40x40cm

The Love Project. It’s a year long process, working on paintings – five at a time. He takes a month away from running his business. And then the exhibition happens.

Mark Welsh has been running FABRIK for 20 years ‘A cross between design, making and painting’. (If you’ve ever been to the WA Museum Boola Bardip, wandered through National Trust buildings and WA’s major sports stadiums, you’ll have glimpsed Mark’s designs, fabrication and installations.)

And Then Everything Turned Itself Inside Out by Mark Welsh
Oil on Canvas | 130x100cm

‘I love the puzzle and the challenge of putting things together – colour, composition, the setting. I try to find a balance between techniques.’

You can feel it in his paintings.

The last solo exhibition at Early Work Gallery in Fremantle referenced nostalgia; historic cars – the EH Holden, V Dub, a Mini Cooper, and a 60’s caravan.

There’s a respect for magic realism (magical elements in realistic settings.) Everyday events comfortably embracing an improbability, something fantastical. It pauses you in his paintings.

The Finders and the Keepers by Mark Welsh | Oil on Canvas | 130x100cm

‘It’s about attaching values to those things - asking about our own values now’.

Mark’s been painting ‘my whole life’. But it was just 3 years ago he ‘found’ oils.

Arriving in WA as a youngster from an industrial town in northern England, he remains inclined towards their subdued colours. Muted, neither bright nor garish. A calmness.

The Folly by Mark Welsh | Oil on Canvas | 130x100cm

His bird series came from a conversation with an Aboriginal advisor when walking around Bibra Lake.

Koolbardi - Australian Magpie - Cracticus tibicen by Mark Welsh
Oil on circular board | 30cm x 30cm

A subsequent exhibition, ‘Everywhen’ was influenced by her wisdom. She spoke of a state of Being. Not separated; not people on the land, and nature separate, the universe detached and far away. Birds were her, and she was them - a knowing 60,000 years old.

His paintings include man made things, and nature taking over… from birds to V Dubs.

His people paintings are friends and local characters like ‘Gene’. Reflections on his formative years; The Port, the Dingo Flour Building, teenage years - and that creative rite of passage of spraying murals inside South Fremantle Power Station.

Gene by Mark Welsh | Oil on board | 25cm x 25cm

Painting is an ongoing evolution. It’s uncompromising.

‘I feel like I am just learning how to paint now…’

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