Mark Edwards – The White Wood

‘The White Wood’ by Mark Edwards

Born in 1951, Mark Edwards studied at Medway College of Art, followed by Walthamstow College of Art in London. Keen to begin his career as an artist, he left education and began exhibiting at local galleries, whilst teaching drawing and illustration.

In 1974, Mark and his wife, Sally, made a spontaneous decision to buy a 1958 Ford Prefect for £25 and drive to the Highlands of Scotland, where they rented an old run-down shepherd’s cottage on the shores of Loch Hope. With no electricity or phone until 1984, they lived in their remote cottage for 28 years. In this stunning and isolated environment, Mark’s artistic ideals thrived, and he found considerable success as both a painter of countryside pursuits and as an illustrator of book covers for a wealth of eminent authors such as Michael Morpurgo, Kingsley Amis and Philip Pullman.

Then in 2007, he became  inspired by a 1950s photograph of a man  in a window on a busy New York street. The man dressed in a bowler hat and coat began appearing in Mark’s paintings of snowy woods. Enduring tension and mystery were created in this body of work, and thus the ‘White Wood’ series of paintings was born. Curious, intriguing, enigmatic, occasionally haunting and always mysterious, these paintings and their unidentified characters in Homburg hats and black overcoats drive the observer to ask questions to which there will never be an answer, wonder at the coats hanging from the trees, the shadows of no-one there, the isolated building, the solitary red balloon, and just to accept the enigma. Deeply textured, these paintings can elicit a profound effect at both a visual and emotional level.

The White Wood made its debut appearance in 2008 and Red Rag Gallery is delighted to present a continuation of this marvellous body of work.