- Image of the Day -

"Hold That Thought - Plitvice N.P., Croatia"

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  Feature Artist Bio

By permission of the artist, The Cyber Art Show is pleased to feature the first of two 12-piece exhibitions of works by American landscape

painter Mark Ivan Cole (born 1960 in Wisconsin, USA).

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Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Mark Ivan Cole discovered a love of drawing as a preschooler, about the same time his family moved to the Andes Mountains of Ecuador. Growing up in the middle of the famed "Avenue of the Volcanoes" gave him a visceral appreciation for high elevations and rugged landscape.

All through his school years, Mark experimented with different media, working to depict what he saw in the world outside, or what he imagined in his own inner world. Besides graphite, forays were made into acrylic, watercolor, colored pencil, and pen and ink. Music took center stage during Cole's college years and into his twenties, but he continued to draw and paint during that time. He spent hours studying great illustrators like Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish and Roger Dean, along with such giants as Albrecht Durer, Thomas Moran, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, John Constable, George Innes and John Singer Sargent.

While Cole could be described as self-taught, the influence of these teachers is immeasurable. When he became a father, he focused on colored pencil, a dry medium which could be worked in fits and starts, as time and toddlers permitted. His proficiency in the medium drew the attention of a large art supply store which invited him to teach a course there. In 2001, Cole's wife gave him a set of soft pastels, and the impact on his art was immediate and enduring. He produced a significant body of work over the next decade, including several pieces that were juried into competitions and garnered top honors. His later pastel work was juried into the annual international show of the Pastel Society of the West Coast three years in a row.

Mark's work has been shown in the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, the Art Museum of Los Gatos, and the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, as well as in galleries and personal collections across the U.S. and Taiwan. For Cole, it was a memorable moment when he entered the Haggin Museum to attend the opening of that year's PSWC show and saw his own work hanging within sight of two paintings in the museum's permanent collection: one by Moran, and another by Bierstadt.

Today, Cole lives with his wife in Taiwan, a country with the greatest concentration of high peaks in the world (per square kilometer), 286 of which are over 3,000 meters (9,800 ft). Since moving to Taiwan, he has focused on acrylic, which works well in the local climate. His recent paintings have been shown online and in invitation-only exhibitions in various places around the country. Cole and his wife have traveled extensively, exploring Europe, Asia, India, and South Africa, as well as the U.S. Those experiences continue to inspire his work.

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  Gallery #586   

   November 8, 2017