About

From his early years painting on a kitchen floor to the studios and residencies that have shaped his work over three decades, Mark Lesser has followed a path defined less by style than by insistence, an insistence on painting as a daily practice, as a journal.

Working in oil and cold wax on large canvases, he builds surfaces through accumulation, through the tension between what is held and what is let go. The grid moves through his work not as architecture but as a kind of internal pressure, a field of relationships that can be pushed through, buried under, or allowed to dissolve entirely into light and color.

His career has moved across disciplines and continents. A residency in Morocco left a lasting mark on his sensibility, its light, its color, its layered complexity still present in the work he makes today. He has exhibited internationally, and that same restlessness gave rise to his debut novel, Bank Holiday, a thriller set in Marrakesh that draws on the same geographical and psychological territory that animates his painting.

He and his wife, Shellie, live and work in Thousand Oaks, California.

(805) 601-9876 | mlesser64@gmail.com