Interview with Designers Gouache Artist Mark Jessett

	Mark Jessett

His mixed media work highlights the unique capabilities of Designers Gouache through the use of bright colours while combining translucent and opaque painting techniques. His work also features a balance between fluid shapes and crisp lines.

The Winsor & Newton Designers Gouache range is an opaque water colour which has been formulated to offer the greatest choice of colours and flexibility to ensure that all artists can choose the best palette to suit their work. The range offers a choice of 85 artist quality colours that are permanent, vibrant and have excellent mixing abilities.

This month our Artists’ Outreach Manager and Resident Artist, Paul Robinson, caught up with Mark about his work and materials.

How would you describe your style of painting?

I make pure abstract paintings that have a heavy reliance on drawing. I have settled on a form, the ellipse, for my current body of work. I am exploring the sense of depth and movement that can be suggested through drawing and painting. Colour plays a major part in my work, as does translucence and opacity. I like to use very fluid, handmade marks alongside crisp, mechanical forms.

	Green Drawing, 2007, 700 x 1000mm, Dry Media & Gouache on Paper

Who and what are your influences?

You can learn and gain influence from almost anyone and anything when you find a resonance there. I like looking at coloured glass objects, in clusters with light passing through them. Sometimes an advertisement in a magazine will spark something off - a combination of colours or a texture. Music also plays a big part in it for me, although I don't make work that is about music. 

I look at other art sporadically - I like to make my own work on its own terms and I don't like to feel I am making something that fits with someone else's. However, I do like a very wide range of artists. My list would include Gary Hume, Karla Black, Kristin Baker, Helen Frankenthaler, Rosemarie Fiore, Ernesto Neto, Hella Jongerius, Richard Hamilton, and John Piper. I'm not ashamed to say that I look a long way back for influences as well as looking at recent artists. 

Gainsborough did wonderful things with paint. Chardin too. Some Tudor paintings have a graphic quality that is very interesting. Drawing is very important to me - Holbein's preparatory drawings are incredible, they have a clarity and accuracy that really appeals to me and then I'll look at Schiele and admire the confidence and spontaneity of his hand. 

Did you study art or are you self taught? 

I studied Fine Art and Contemporary Critical Theory at Goldsmiths College. The theory part nearly finished me. 

Since you began painting, how has your style and technique evolved? 
Since I started painting seriously I have swung between pure abstraction and highly graphic figurative work. In recent years I have made work in the same spirit as I did when I was fifteen years old but with a better understanding of what I need to do, what materials and techniques are available to me and why I am doing it at all. The real evolution has come in the confidence to make work that might not be successful – and just to make. 

I am always fighting myself to stop imposing rules on my work. My style seems to be naturally tight so I try hard to counter this. Technique tends to improve the more you use it, unless you pursue it for its own sake. I think technique is only successful when you apply it to the problem of making art. 

What’s your inspiration? 

The work itself. The hope that I can make something beautiful and resonant. The fact that Art exists at all and that there is something in (most of) us that seeks out the experience of art. The feeling that I haven't yet made work as good as it could be. Optimism, I suppose, or denial. I know what the work means to me and what drives it, but the meaning isn't the inspiration - it is intrinsic. I won't state the meaning that the work has for me - the viewer may find their own meaning which bears no relation to my sense of meaning. It doesn't matter. Making the work matters.  

Life's Too Short, 2011, 500 x 500mm, Dry Media & Gouache on Paper

What source material do you use?

I make my own source material through sketching and collage. There is no source for pure abstract work other than the work that has gone before. However, I will often take something from old photos or advertising images - shapes, composition, colours and juxtaposed colours, areas of fogginess and gradients. I like macro photos of insects and pictures of cakes. None of this is transferred directly into the work; it goes in somewhere and comes out somewhere else.   

What materials do you use throughout the process from conception to finished painting? 

I use a lot of different materials and my work would not exist if I didn't use mixed media. The list goes - graphite, charcoal pencil, compressed charcoal, coloured pencil, soft pastel, Conté à Paris, watercolour, gouache, acrylic, oil paint, collage. Sometimes a painting will consist of coloured pencil and acrylic only, which will be based on a simple graphite sketch and other colour sketches. I am looking forward to using oils more but it will take time to get there.   

How do you find Winsor & Newton materials work with your practice?

I love to use Winsor & Newton materials because they are so reliable - consistency and quality are so important as it's very distracting when you are working with materials that perform badly. Also, I know I don't have to worry about the longevity of my work when I'm using Winsor & Newton artist quality materials. Plus, the colour ranges are very wide (in all media) so there is a lot of choice. Finding unusual colours can be really inspiring.

	Designers' Gouache Set

Since creating images for our Designers’ Gouache packaging what have you been up to?

I have entered into relationships with a handful of regional galleries. I had work in the Newcastle Gateshead Art Fair and I have work going to the Affordable Art Fair in London in October. This year I have been drawing a lot, using soft pastel, pencil and gouache. I've really tried to pin down the direction my work is taking.

For further information on Mark Jessett see his Featured Artists’ Page or visit his website.