Target Practice

Home”Target Practice, a peaceful exhibit“

 

About the Artist, Mark Swindle

 

 

 

 

Sometime in the second half of the 20th century I was born next to the ocean, in Los Angeles, but was raised in the middle of an ocean of corn, in rural, coal-mining, Bible-thumping Central Illinois. This uprooting had significance—first by starting off a search for a place to call home (49 attempts); and by launching a violent immune system reaction, severe asthma, where normal activities like a run and romp in Nature were followed up by days in bed gasping for breath. But sickness can create opportunities, and I filled my head with knowledge, devouring all the books—especially encyclopedias—I could get my hands on, and grew a wickedly-vivid imagination. Dreams of a future as an astronaut, airplane pilot or archeologist came and went, and it wasn’t until a 2-week debilitation with measles, when in the midst of a fever dream state, that my first true brush with art happened: something came flowing out of my fingers onto paper that felt like a world i could step into. I extracted a vision, and made it real.

 

My mom—an amateur painter—was delighted, and attempted to steer me into this art class and that. I despised them all, but was unstoppable with paper and pen and paint at home, and began winning competitions and became known at school as The Art Kid. It wasn’t until my late teens that I found my mentors, art instructors. I could scarcely fathom the books of theory they pushed at me but I could feel an enormous pride in having these 2 men believe in my talent and encourage me, step-by-step to explore.

Artists are like professional athletes: unless you’re at the top, your state of being tends toward struggling, poor and loser. Like any other kid with both left- and right-brain skills, I was nudged toward a mix of both, and was lucky enough to fall in love for the first time at the age of 16. My lover was called architecture.

That lover is on display here, in my work, and can be thought of as a second marriage, a return, because by the time I finished with 4 years of university studies, the love affair was over: although I absolutely loved the process of design, I abhorred the idea of 20 years spent doing plumbing details and construction drawings for the work of others, and gradually having my soul sucked dry. It also didn’t help that a Recession was slamming the architecture profession particularly hard. So I took up waiting tables, sales of solar energy systems, truck driving, land surveying, poetry and writing, construction…

…and college textbook and medical illustration. However, even though this lasted almost 10 years, sometime around the 8,000th illustration for the 52nd or 53rd book, it became clear this was far too dangerous: on a June morning, after laying out a 3-panel drawing of a young male being struck by a car, I was struck and injured by a car exactly as shown in the drawing. The next week, while doing illustrations of gunshot wound profiles, I refused to leave the house.

So I did what any normal person would do: I abandoned that profession, co-founded Chicago’s most dangerous record store, The Quaker Goes Deaf, and a video-on-demand start-up, Cinewav; had 3 marriages and 3 divorces, raised a daughter and a stepson; dove headfirst into the Internet in the late 90s; did a 7-year stint at Northwestern University as senior designer; dropped out of grad school 3 times; then jumped across The Atlantic at the end of 2009 to begin life in Europe…first in Amsterdam (4 years), France (1 year), suitcase living (2 years), finally here, in Catalunya…a place I can finally call home.

There are 9 near-death experiences hidden in all this mess, but let’s get back to the topic of marriage, specifically the previously-mentioned one to architecture, and the other to illustration.

Architecture

It was a dark and stormy night when, after the bars had closed, my best friend, Ike Hobbs, an art school grad, and I climbed to the top of a building and launched into one of our high-speed conversations about art. As a repressed architect, I was especially livid that he seemed trapped not only inside a rectangular frame but also 2 dimensions. One of his wild gesticulations broke a window of the rooftop shanty and I exclaimed “Glass! Glass! Why don’t you paint on glass! On both sides. Scrape some away! Layering! Transparency! F*** your acrylics on canvas! Go 3D, dammit!”

And he did. Within weeks he was churning out works on glass that were dazzling. And although I was smitten with the organic forms of medical illustration, by the time I finally sat down to create a new body of work in 2013, I wanted to build things with moving parts and dimensionality and with all the technical complexity that a building would require, a mental construction translated into a built object, with layers and transparencies. And glass. Ike’s presence is strong.

 

 

 

 

Illustration

Encyclopedias were my best childhood friend, so it was sublime to be a real, live encyclopedia illustrator. And what illustration—especially medical or encyclopedia illustration—is all about is this: subtracting distractionary detail and highlighting core content thus making the depiction so crystal clear that it goes into someone’s mind, makes an edible imprint, and imparts a clear comprehension. The stronger the impact, the better, and provocation is a powerful tool to achieve this. This same process dovetailed beautifully with one of my other careers: as a user experience designer and information architect the goal is to guide a human through a complex process in a simple way, and thereby impart an understanding, a feeling, a lucid experience.