Mark Depman
Mark Depman was born in Camden, New Jersey in 1954.
He was educated at Harvard College and Cornell University Medical College and was a Knox Fellow, Balliol College and John Ruskin School of Drawing and Painting at Oxford, England. He resides in Connecticut.
Mark Depman’s Cibachrome photographs bring a new definition to the concept of still-life.
Images captured by the artist in his home, while rigorously cropped, are an intimate vista into the “stuff of life,” with which Depman lives.
The stuff that interests him visually provides stimulation in the home environment and incorporates that which is personal and present with that which is universal and connected to history.
Within each of the Cibachrome images, providing a source of inner light, is a rectangular, post card size and shape electro-luminescent panel, a light panel made by the artist which emits a greenish glowing color.
On the surface of the electro-luminescent panel is an image floating in space, an expanded floor plan of a cathedral superimposed on a child’s back, the only colors being black and green.
The luminescent panels, while kindling the radiantly colored more conventional still-life objects, function as a foil to them.
The green mysterious “lights” are a window into another parallel universe of consideration and thought, a realm beyond reach, a realm of poetry, spirituality, abstraction.
Depman juxtaposes framed photographs of his family; his son as a baby, his ancestors, his wife, with gallery announcements, with the daily mail, with intimate-scaled sepia watercolors of maple leaves from his back yard, with his computer, with a morning dish of butter and the knife to spread it.
The objects are on desks, on tabletops, on shelves, in front of each other, behind, stacked casually, cubistically, a personal mise-en-scene of ordinary things that become sacred as ritual of daily life.
Color figures large in Depman’s new Cibachromes, reds, yellows, blue-greens, a true celebration of the spectrum.
With this new still-life series, Depman returns to color in full bloom for the first time in years.
Like reading a diary with daily personal jottings, Depman’s mise-en-scenes are a window into his sensibility and his soul.