Mark Renner

The human characters portrayed in my work share a commonality with much of mankind. Often engaged in a search for deeper meaning, they are sojourners, agrarian and nomadic, frequently adrift in some imaginary terrain. Some are downcast, others cast aside. Many are thirsting seekers frantically grasping for an elusive rest to an inward longing. Largely plebeian, sometimes entangled in the human struggles and conflicts that come with living, burdened by the problems endemic in their own nature, they are noble workers, weary workers. Some are driven to wander in a desire for forgetting, some by the hope that lies beyond their current circumstance. I am drawn to a directness of expression in the unadorned ways and idioms of humanity. As a self-taught painter, I have, for decades, pressed hard to develop a personal visual language. I have often grasped to convert or transmit the swellings of the inward imagination into a work that would, if possible, provoke deeper examination. I would balk at the idea of doing so for mere novelty or polemical reasons. Without being directly illustrative, my work has been prompted or informed by everything from literary works (e.g., Bunyan