MARK PACHECO
Artwork
Oil on canvas 24 x 26 in.
Oil on canvas 30 x 38 in.
Oil on canvas 16 x 20 in.
Oil on canvas 24 x 26 in.
Biography
Greatly influenced by the Ashcan painters like Bellows, Henri, and Hopper, Mark Pacheco has been recreating the world around himself for some time. During his formative years struggling as an artist in New York Pacheco worked as a picture framer for galleries and museums. During this experience he became intimately close with the work and the studios of contemporary artists like Malcolm Morley and Roe Ethridge. Both artists helped give Pacheco the freedom to break away from any preconditioned notions of art and “just work”.
A portfolio of art prints Pacheco’s grandmother began collecting in 1937 originally inspired his current body of work. The first image was a poorly rendered print of a Joshua Reynolds portrait, with hand-separated colors that only vaguely resembled the original hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pacheco’s interpretation mimics the print rather than the painting, painstakingly reproducing borders and captions as well as the artwork. Additional paintings in this series incorporate dioramas from the Natural History Museum, vintage art books and an elaborately framed corner of a Rubens painting. The intention is to explore the origin of the media and the reality of what images are.