THE ADAA ART SHOW: Mark Laver • New Work

MARK LAVER was born in 1970 in Victoria, British Columbia, and raised in a rural area of Vancouver Island, where he spent his childhood exploring the surrounding beaches, tidal swamps, creeks, and forests. His current and ongoing body of work depicts landscapes of a mysterious beauty that is at once luscious and moody, cohesive and in flux. Without reference to photographs, drawings, real places, or even conscious memories, Laver starts with a limited palette and no pre-existing plans and discovers his paintings in the act of painting. Each work provides its own surprises, as new symbols and motifs emerge, grow, and repeat, adding to his ever-expanding invented world.Most recently, Laver has retaken to a curved space technique that he started experimenting with in his twenties, opening increased formal and conceptual possibilities.

*The following quotes by the artist were excerpted from an interview conducted by Alejandra Russi in August of 2022*

"I tend not to add new elements to this invented world on purpose; I wait until something occurs to me while painting. More recently, water and rain have found their way in, via this kind of automatism that reaches back to a childhood of forests, beaches, tidal swamps, and west coast weather."

"I do like the primordial, post-apocalyptic empty feeling of some of these landscapes, but I’m not against figuration—and I don’t believe in a solid ontological distinction between plant and animal life, or even what we conventionally call living and non-living things. In fact, I feel like my landscapes are almost human in themselves"

"the curved space is the most prominent aspect of the newest work, it brings along a whole new world of implications for the use of color, light, narrative, and the relationships of figure and space, background and foreground."

"I work best when painting is instinctual, intuitive, and bodily. But I am also undeniably preoccupied with the “big questions”, and I tend to think and judge, and think some more. So I strike that balance between thinking and doing by embedding my core beliefs into my method of working. In other words, I devise a set of procedures and practices that are faithful to those ideas so I don’t have to think about them while pushing paint around."

"when I stand back to look at the painting I want to see something I believe in, something fresh, new, alive, and never seen before, something conceptually relevant yet still intuitive, painterly, and visceral."