​​MARCUS VINCENT / BIO

Visually inquisitive being

Born in San Francisco, California, Marcus Vincent was raised in Buffalo, New York. His work shifted from early figurative subjects to non-objective works concerned with ideas around experiential color interaction, emotional relationships to musical harmony, and zen gesture. Vincent's works have been exhibited in various venues, are represented in private and public collections, and have been published in a number of books and periodicals. He has taught painting and drawing at the university level full time for several decades.

 

The flow of life in terms of nuances presented through experience (and dreams) forms the basis of efforts visually in objects made. While no one instance is as the root of any given piece, each experience may be present in associations that accumulate in meanings sometimes only felt. The works may be without representation, but do, I suppose, yet have subject matter. They are not “Oh, whatever happens is good,” but rather are a response to the vicissitudes that accumulate like barnacle colonies on the heads of Humpback whales. Stuff that happens and needs some sort of processing to find their place in meaning.

 

The works have been influenced by an almost instinctual response to color/space both in the material of substance (interrelationships of pigment, media, and substrate), but also in the indication of space definition as guided by emotional impulse. They originate in an intuitive color/shape consciousness that is articulated by found structural geometric and organic forms that serve as vessels for impulses that are aware of their conversations. At the same time, the essential reminder of the touch of the hand in occasional unrepentant strokes lends a sense of purposiveness in contrast to the passages that simply arrive through process. Improvisation is paramount. The process yields opportunities for pentimenti in transparent or translucent passages in combination with dense opaque portions that carve with endless corrections the overall organization. The "State of Being" of the piece seeks a sense of orchestration of elements in one sort of conjunction or another that is similar to a "setting" in musical composition.