Mark Cazalet
- Faculty
Biography
Mark Cazalet attended Chelsea and Falmouth College of Art before being awarded two postgraduate scholarships with The French Government at L'Ecole des-beaux-Arts in Paris (Christian Boltanski's Atelier), and subsequently at MS University Baroda, West India with The Association of Commonwealth Universities (under Prof Gulam Mohammed Sheikh). Cazalet has completed large-scale glass and painted works for many ecclesiastical settings including Worcester, Manchester, and Chelmsford Cathedrals. He works with fabricators in materials as varied as mosaic, mural, stained glass, etched/engraved glass, textiles, and lino woodcut limited edition books. Each year he also undertakes a small number of portraits. Cazalet's studio practice is based around drawing, painting and printmaking, usually concerned with landscape themes, informed by particular qualities of light, colour and presence. In the spring of 2012 and 2013 he was artist in residence at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut.
On drawing
Drawing is the engine of all my other work, from doodled speculations, empiric observations, preliminary designs to transcriptions of the art I admire. A good drawing for me may be so raw and rudimentary that it makes no sense to anyone else, but if it gets to something new or transforms what I have experienced in a fresh manner it is more exciting than the largest finished project. Drawing is where the work goes on: thinking, fumbling and discovering. There is nowhere to hide when you draw; each mark and touch conveys precisely the individual's state of mind and clarity of intention. Recently I have been drawing a lot at night with gold and silver markers. The event becomes a performance in which there is no erasing or editing, just a sequence of decisions based on the emerging whole. Drawing is a conduit of all the other senses, what one smells, hears, feels and the tension within one's own body and mind. A great drawing is a record not only of profound sensibility at work but a courageous x-ray of the whole psyche responsible for it.
Specialism
Drawing
