Mark Surridge

Painting

Mark Surridge was born in 1963, he studied at Maidstone College of Art and gained an MA at Falmouth University, where he was a part time senior lecturer on Fine Art BA.

He has established himself as a highly devoted and consummate abstract artists living and working in Cornwall. Landscape and the elemental forces of nature have been major inspirations in his work, resulting in ambitious large-scale paintings, sculpture and installation.

Surridge's distinctive and individual work has been selected for numerous exhibitions including, the Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall, The Royal Academy, London, The Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, Tremenheere Gallery, Cornwall, Mini-Meta Abstract Painting from mid-generation British Artists, London and Tate St Ives, Cornwall. In 2018 Surridge was the recipient of The Waiheke Art Residency in New Zealand and he has had many solo exhibitions.

Mark Surridge’s paintings reveal traces, signs and veils, the paintings he makes often suggest archaeology - revealing traces, signs and codes; remembered and then transformed into works of ‘equivalence of experience’. Some of the canvases are divided into two parts, suggesting the passing of accumulated time or the movement of an ultra violet scanning device, searching for meaning. He uses GPS technology to map where he is on Earth, which helps him connect to his surroundings and then after in the studio, imagining what these shapes would look like from the beginning to the end of a walk as a mapped terrain. He uses the principles of the palimpsest to look at the world, the most distant layers erased or partially erased by the ones in front, the landscape can be seen as a series of elements, pictorial, psychological and metaphorical.