All The Things: The Art of Mark Loughney

I started making art in an unlikely place - my prison cell. The results from those late-night sessions still inform my drawings and paintings today. My work explores a variety of complex aesthetic content by reimagining dark subject matter and employing abstraction of the natural world. Many of my pieces balance this thematic intensity with a degree of humor, which I use to combat the heaviness of the content of my work. I make these pieces using a variety of media, including acrylic, ink, oil stick, oil pastel, graphite, charcoal, colored pencil, conte, and collage.

Some drawings stand out for their bizarre imagery. Each piece begins as an idea hatched upon paper from an initial abstract composition. Then, these abstracted forms morph into a gallbladder, a foreleg, a backbone, a river, or other strange visuals. Other snippets of absurdity crawl around my work, as well. A common motif you will find is a character that I call the Botfly: a pupa that represents a transitional life stage. The Botfly’s black and white stripes allude to the uniform of a prisoner, yet it seems ready to bust out of its shiny chitinous exoskeleton with innate joy.

When I was In prison, I drew over 800 portraits of the men with whom I was incarcerated. This collection, titled Pyrrhic Defeat: A Visual Study Of Mass Incarceration, has been featured as the cover of Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood’s award-winning book, Marking Time: Art In The Age Of Mass Incarceration and has been in the traveling exhibition of the same title. I am currently adding to this project by drawing an additional 800 portraits of people who support criminal justice reform efforts.

[Contact Mark for availability of artwork and prints].