Mark Ezra Merrill

David Fairbanks Ford introducing MEM to the circuit for his talk on Alchemy, Tarot, and the Periodic Table of Elements in conjunction with Born Free Radicals. Main Street Museum April 1, 2007

As an Artist, I look for what I cannot always see. I am interested in any available insight, as seen through an internal yet interpersonal individuality. I seek to understand intuition's influence on perception; how precepts of integrity, value, and meaning are in turn influenced by an emerging bio-political, techno-ecological landscape.

A vehicle is a work art - whether it is a shirt, a seat belt, or a word you can't decide how to spell - not that we understand these things or somehow have capabilities of imbuing these objects with a maigickal like life - it is simply because we are these things - internalized or inverted - it is a matter of possession - we are transposed by them - and they by us. Mark E Merrill

As a Painter, I want to challenge my perception. What can be observed can also be manipulated. What is un-known sometimes becomes known, just as what has already been seen is often forgotten. Uncertainty is timeless and resolute. The most puerile act of the painter is an action of seeing and remembering. My process is deeply dependent on the sublimation of this value, this expanding or contracting of uncertainty.

As an American, I hope to refine my critical awareness. Our Nation State is set on edge by the continual threat of cultural uncertainty. Our lives, night after night, day after day, are devalued by a carefully commercialized and marketed identity of image, product, and entertainment distracting us from seeing what we could see if we truly wanted to.

Tip Top Studio

Thanksgiving Day November 27, 1997. The studio in the Tip Top bakery, a prominent but dilapidated feature of old downtown White River Junction, is inherited from a somewhat obscure lineage by Mark E Merrill.

The 1600 sq ft studio, formerly the Muffin Room, included a leaking ceiling and a still dripping lard pipe. The building was purchased and renovated by Matt Bucy in 2000, currently the Tip Top Media & Arts Building, it serves as a vibrant example of ingenuity and a foreshadowing renaissance for WRJ.

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Early Works

The first series of work begun was a less a continuation of previous work, and more a conceptual adaptation of my immediate environment. My initial conception was to paint layers smooth glass-like translucent colour onto medium size square canvases. This idea was interrupted each night, as the train line running Montreal to NYC would shake the poor building causing flakes of paint, dust and other debris to attach to my canvases. Abandoning the daily ritual of removing these tiny flakes and particles with a pair of tweezers I kept by my easel, I began to explore a more textural theme,

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