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. This early immersion in nature has resurfaced as a major influence in his current work.
An avid drawer into his teenage years, Laver nevertheless had almost no exposure to art history or painting until he moved to Victoria at the age of 19 to attend a two-year visual arts diploma program. “At some point in first year I fell head-over-heels in love with painting,” he says. His first instructor agreed, saying emphatically, “Mark, you’re a painter, and you are just going to have to paint for the rest of your life.”
A year-long backpacking trip across Europe followed and he met his future wife in Edinburgh in 1993, with whom he now has three children. In his mid-twenties he was recruited to join a small collective of artists who believed that contemporary art had not kept up with thinking in other fields—and he applied ideas from quantum physics, evolution, and non-Euclidean geometry to experiments with pictorial space, color, and narrative. Around this time, Laver also pursued a BA in Art History and Philosophy at the University of Victoria where he specialized in phenomenology, philosophy of art, and the history of pictorial space in painting. “I did this solely for my art,” he says. “The idea was that I would learn the history of thought (philosophy) and the history of art at a higher level than I would at art school and this, in turn, would benefit my work. I figured I could continue to develop the technique part on my own." Laver has also been working all along, as a cook, food writer and jewelry assembler, part-time when possible, enough to support his family, while leaving as much time, and mental space, for his art.
After the more theoretically based work of his early years, he spent about ten years painting what he called Rural Disasters, paintings of car crashes and rural structure fires inspired by documentary photographs found online. As a counterpoint to the more ambitious studio work, Laver has also painted landscapes onsite, both in daylight and at night, finishing each work outdoors in a single intuitive burst.
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, arriving at the composition last. Each work provides its own surprises, as new symbols and motifs emerge, grow, and repeat, adding to his ever-expanding invented world.
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"I suddenly found myself painting all these strange landscapes, without reference to any real places ... I like to say they aren’t coming out of my head, but out of my hand, as I simply start painting in one place and let what happens guide what I do next"
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"the composition comes last. This may seem backwards, and it is a challenge to work this way, but the painting, when finished, is always surprising, and the results often open up new avenues of exploration"
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"At some point it occurred to me that my work could be seen as a synthesis of mid-century American regionalism and abstract expressionism, the two opposing camps in last century’s battle for supremacy in American Art"
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"the landscape, and by extension the universe, is alive, communicating with itself, cannibalizing itself, screaming, biting, moaning and singing to itself"
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"I’ve started to wonder what feature of the natural landscape most mirrors the individual human psyche ..."
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"It takes a great deal of concentration to remain in the moment and trust my intuition, but it aligns with my beliefs about the origin and evolution of the universe, that is: that it wasn’t created by an outside source, but evolved from within, and that the world wasn’t designed, but arose from trial and error, over millions of years, guided only by an inner sense of equilibrium and order"
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"These fairly distinctive white trees have shown up in a few of the paintings, and I can’t quite pin it down, but something feels universal and seemingly powerful about them"
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"I believe that contemporary landscape painting has as much potential as any other kind of painting to convey the emotional range, tragedy, humor, potency, and scope of the human condition"
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"I grew up on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, in a rural working class family, and didn’t know any artists or intellectuals growing up. I did, however, spend a lot of time exploring the shallow creeks, tidal swamps, gravel roads and dense forests of my childhood home"
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"It has been suggested that this is what the white paths in my paintings signify: a life’s journey. Some lead nowhere; some circle back; others head off into the dark woods, or over the horizon, past dark threats and bright moments, yet ultimately heading toward blackness"
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"Every painting of mine morphs and evolves until it falls somewhere within an indefinable range of emotion that somehow feels just right. Aesthetic choices, are after all, emotional choices are they not?"
