Mark Crofton Bell

Mark Crofton Bell (Toronto, ON) graduated with an AOCA from the Ontario College of Art and Design, and an MFA from the Chelsea College of Art and Design (London, UK). He has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad, has received numerous grants and awards and has participated in a variety of artist residencies. The process of transforming photography into painting is one of Bell’s primary concerns. He collects images from a variety of sources, which function as a kind of notebook of personal observation and become source material for Bell’s paintings. The subject of these images is often fragmented or fleeting, a decidedly odd perspective of the urban world, absences and interruptions of otherwise ordinary scenes. These photographs act as a starting point for his work and what begins as copying soon becomes interpretation. Eventually the photograph is abandoned altogether as the artist tries to resolve the work in terms of what each composition requires.

To those of us who are not printmakers, the world of print appears as a rarified practice filled with obscure terminology and complex systems performed on technology from a different era. To the outsider this perception can make it difficult to find inroads to the medium. The Visiting Artist Program at Open Studio was the bridge that gave me the opportunity not just to enter this world, but to participate in it fully.
– Mark Crofton Bell, Visiting Artist 2011-12