0-3 Years Experience
Mark Friday-Lewis
Mark Friday-Lewis Art
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Selling Existing Work
About the Artist
Mark Friday-Lewis is a Cincinnati-based artist whose work moves fluidly between abstraction, figurative painting, and plein-air landscape. His creative practice is rooted in observation, but it’s equally driven by intuition—where a mark, a shift in color, or the rhythm of a composition can lead to unexpected meaning.Mark’s plein-air studies, often painted on site at places like Spring Grove Cemetery and the neighborhoods of Cincinnati, are meditations on light and structure—how the seen world can dissolve into color relationships and atmosphere. His figurative work, influenced by life-drawing practice and archetypal psychology, explores the human form as both presence and metaphor. In his abstract and mixed-media paintings, gesture and geometry intersect; layers of acrylic, charcoal, and pastel reveal a push and pull between chaos and order, movement and stillness.
Across all modes, Mark’s philosophy centers on process and play. He believes in painting as a conversation with uncertainty—where discovery happens through making rather than planning. Iteration, material experimentation, and the willingness to let an image evolve are at the core of his approach.
Guided by the conviction that meaning emerges through form, Mark sees art as a bridge between perception and emotion, intellect and intuition. Whether painting from life or imagination, he seeks to create work that invites viewers into that same state of attentive curiosity—a moment of pause in which the ordinary becomes luminous.
Shattered Currents
“Shattered Currents” captures the energy of movement within stillness—angular shards of cool blue and green seem to drift and collide against a backdrop of intense magenta and violet. The interplay of sharp black lines and soft, translucent layers invites the viewer to navigate between structure and spontaneity. Textural shifts and subtle gradients hint at depth, as if fragments of light are suspended mid-motion in a charged, atmospheric space. This multimedia work balances bold geometry with expressive mark-making, creating a dynamic visual rhythm that feels both deliberate and unpredictable.
Ember Crown
This piece feels like a quiet figure half-formed in firelight, caught between certainty and doubt, as if a memory is trying to step forward and speak. I’m drawn to the way the face dissolves into shadow and color, holding both strength and vulnerability in the same breath. I built the image with layered acrylic, pushing and scraping paint to let unexpected greens, violets, and oranges flicker through the surface. Each pass of the brush was a way of carving the head out of the background, letting the crown-like shapes emerge almost by accident as the colors deepened and collided.
Light Between the Stones
This piece holds the quiet feeling of walking through grief and finding, almost unexpectedly, how gentle the light can be. The gravestones become small markers inside a much larger rhythm of trees, shadow, and air, and I feel both the weight of history and the softness of the present moment here. Painted this on site at Spring Grove Cemetery in gouache focusing on how the warm greens and cool shadows cut across the path.
