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 at Balliol College and John Ruskin School of Drawing and Painting, Oxford, England. He resides in Guilford, Connecticut.

Depman’s new work continues to explore and bring into sharp focus his contemporary definition of the still life. Desktops and mantelpieces from home and studio bear the stuff of modern America. These lush new images--vibrant tableaux of portraits, coins, office supplies, toys and computer hardware--recall the traditions of 17th and 18th century still life and vanitas painting.

Each of the new works is punctuated by a signature-illuminated image, either on a computer screen or on one of Depman’s electroluminescent green panels. These images within images draw the viewer into an elusive, parallel universe, by turns whimsical, peaceful and malevolent. In doing so, they invite comparison to medi-eval “illuminated texts, ” replete with explicit and implicit symbols gleaned from modern life.

It is natural for Depman--trained as artist and physician--to explore contemporary tensions among art, science and religion. Each illuminated image “lights up” in much the way a radio-isotope illuminates areas of medical concern in a human radiograph. Here Depman’s focus is the way technology serves as a vector for much of what is vital in contemporary life.

In these domestic portraits with “illuminated texts” the viewer can muse on technology’s impact on the artist’s focus: art, science and religion. His recurrent imagery of children, particularly given recent events, reminds us that the world we are passing on to future generations, while resembling the past, has been irrevocably transfigured.