Mark DeLura:

I make paintings, which are based, partly, on my intimate involvement with the art of painting and partly on my equally intimate involvement with various physical locations.

I have made paintings based on favorite hay and clover fields, as seen in different sorts of light, in a valley near my home; paintings based on different kinds of flowering trees in and around the town that I live in; paintings that came from walking through freshly plowed fields of different soil types. For two years I worked on a series based on the High Peaks region of the Adirondack Mountains, an area that I have camped and hiked through extensively.

If there is a location that interests me I begin by spending time there quieting my mind so I can become as aware as possible of everything that I am taking in. Eventually, I will notice the places where my eye and mind settle - it might be a spot on a particular object or the overall color of a field of trees as seen in a particular light. Only then will I begin mixing colors from life, colors that hold, for me, something about that object or place. The colors that I mix on site become “color samples” that I bring back to the studio along with my mixing notes and other site generated writings. In the studio I will again sit with my color samples, writings, and my memories and notice where it is that my mind lingers. At this point I will begin remixing colors staying faithful to my samples and to my memory. Eventually, after preparing a number of colors , I begin painting.

For seven years my paintings took the form of vertical stripes. I had no formal attachment to stripes; my interest was simply that I found them to be a rather neutral armature onto which I could apply colors. By applying my colors in this way I felt that I was able to get closer to what it is that I experienced in these landscape locations than I could by painting representationally. Then for about eighteen months I worked to free my paintings from any predictable underlining structure. I did this because I wanted to make more room in my work. What kind of room and why more? I can not exactly say, but it has lead to the paintings looking like a collection of splotches and dribbles, which feels really good and right too. Even though the paintings still look very specific and complete I feel that now they also have an element of uncertainty. I welcome this sense of uncertainty. I feel that this is letting the paintings grow beyond their formal or associative beginnings.