Alumni: Words with Mark Bischel

Graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UCM in 1982, Mark currently resides in New York City, teaching at the School of Visual Arts, working with a myriad of clients, and continually showing his breathtakingly beautiful personal work. Recently returning to Warrensburg for “Next Stop,” his solo exhibit at the University of Central Missouri’s Gallery of Art and Design, Mark was kind enough to answer a few questions about his creative process as well as his time here at UCM.

(Above photo: Detail image from artist’s book Resurfaced, 14.5x22”, Screenprint on paper)

Can you give us a brief overview of the work in the exhibition “Next Stop”?

The work in “Next Stop” is an extension of my interest in the city as a subject in itself with its public spaces and extensive infrastructure.

You’ve talked about strengthening your work by giving yourself an obstacle to work around. What kind of obstacle did you give yourself for the drawings shown in “Next Stop?”

The works on the North wall that included “Dolorous” and “Monumental” along with the four smaller works are a little older and involve an abstract drawing of forms that might suggest objects as a starting point. This means rather than to go out and try to be inspired by a subject as it is and then to just draw it, I start by making a series of small abstract mono prints and, when I have one that is interesting, I grid it off and scale it up to a larger drawing in charcoal. Then, I look at this abstraction and try to imagine something there that has the beginnings of an urban scene. The idea is similar to one lying on the lawn and letting the chance formations in the clouds suggest faces and landscapes. Now that I write this, it sounds crazy but this attempt to draw figuration through abstraction is the one of the obstacles I mentioned in the lecture that helps my approach to drawing. It is the obstacle that brings in an element of mysterious difficultly that I can’t control. Also, if I do continue to draw a scene though the abstraction and it gets boring I will erase a large portion of the existing drawing and then turn the piece upside down and sit down in front of it and ask myself what it is that I see now. Then with sketches and photo reference I work back into the drawing and take it in a new direction. In this process, when it is successful, there is the tension of figuration through abstraction.

On the other hand, there are the four large drawing of dancers and performers in the subway below Grand Central Terminal. These drawings, which are from late last year use photos as a starting point and then are altered with the additions of other elements from outside the original source, the original photo. This sets up another obstacle or problem that helps to remove the drawing from the usual processes.

Dolorous, 38” x 50”, charcoal on paper

New York City offers quite the contrast to the Midwest. What was that transition like, and how has living in an urban environment like New York affected your work?

That is broad question that requires some context. After freelancing as an illustrator in Springfield for a year after graduating from UCM I was able to move to Kansas City and get a job as an illustrator with a small design studio. We were always busy and as the sole illustrator there were many late nights and weekends, especially when the studio was smaller and my employer Mike Gregg (a UCM graduate as well) was growing the business. I also started teaching drawing twice a week in the illustration department at the Kansas City Art Institute. I mention all this to say that I was just too busy trying to focus on anything other than the work on hand, which was illustration and teaching. I did very little if any fine art while I lived in Kansas City and did not have a dedicated studio in all those years that was separate from my work in the design studio.

When I decided to get a Masters, it was with the idea of possibly teaching illustration full-time in the future. I had saved enough over the years to take a chance to leave Kansas City to attend the MFA Illustration as Visual Essay program at School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. In this program the line between illustration and fine art was almost nonexistent and many of our teachers were fine artists who also worked as illustrators. This also meant we might be having a critique of our thesis project by an art director from the New Yorker one week and then by the owner of a gallery the next, but it was interesting to see how the work one was doing was perceived just for what it was without being placed into categories such as "fine art" or "illustration". Also I was forced to focus more on what was vital about my work and to not to make such a hard distinction between art I did for myself and images I would present to art directors. At this time I began to experiment with printmaking again, as I had in John Haydu's class 20 years earlier, and so, when I received my masters from SVA and a friend wanted to get a studio across the river in Queens, I decided to jump and to begin a larger body of work beyond school or illustration that was my own work and to see where this would lead me. 

On top of client work, you’ve released a number of painting series and artist books. Why do you feel that it’s so important to work on personal projects outside of commercial work?

As alluded to above, it is important for me to work on personal projects outside of my illustration work as the personal work informs the rest of the work and helps to give it a direct ion that is deeper and richer. One may have likes and dislikes about what type of work one may want to focus on after school but often, as it was in my case, there is a lack of financial security or opportunity to do exactly the type of work one wants to be known for right out of school. Now, there may be those who go right to the top out of school doing work that fulfills their vision, but if this not the case and one is working away at something less than imagined then it is important to have the creative self-determination to stage mini-revolutions and give yourself the space and time to develop work that is personal. An active sketchbook is the best defense.

Two of thirty-two images for Endless New York Myriorama, mixed media and digital

A lot of your illustrations are heavily based in printmaking. What is it about the hand-built process that translates so successfully into your digital work?

So a sketchbook is a great thing to carry around whether it is drawing subjects on location or from your imagination. I found that it was interesting to take some of these drawing from sketchbooks on location and supplement them with drawing from photos I had taken and bring these into the screen printing process and then bind them as books in limited additions. Hand-bound artist’s books are interesting as they can straddle that printmaking, fine art, illustration divide. It can even involve the graphic novel. Artist’s books and printmaking have a tendency to facilitate personal works that feed into illustrative imagery.

I do know it is key to bring hand-drawn into the mix, as this is the element that helps to translate the hand-built into the digital. The original drawing, for all it’s imperfections, has a linear tactile quality and urgency that can then be scanned and enhanced by layers in Photoshop or by layers in screen-printing, but the original source material is the drawing.

Can you tell us a little about the process behind your screen-printed artist book “Through Corridors of Light,” both conceptually and physically? How has the project evolved since its conception?

Actually, the book began as a book–making assignment when I was getting my masters where we each developed an artist’s book for display for a show at the Society of Illustrators. The original book was a collection of drawings done on location in the city and Xeroxed at 150% on newsprint to give it a rough feel. I was not happy with the results so over the summer of my first year here I reworked the book and screen-printed it on reeves BFK and had this second version hand-bound in time for the exhibition. I had printed an edition of 15 but never bound these flats and off to storage they went. After working on other things, I decided to drag them out after several years and began to make additional pages and images. I had these hand-bound in the edition of 15, one of which was included in the show. This essentially new book is called “Resurfaced” as some of the new images are printed over some very bad poetry that was originally printed on some of the spreads.


North of Canal, Oil on wood, 18x21

How has your education at UCM carried over to what you’re doing now?

The grounding I received in the drawing classes at UCM have carried over into what I’m doing currently. We were really drilled on how to draw and the teachers we had then at UCM brought their diverse perspectives into what was valuable to them about drawing as well as the fundamental techniques of drawing. This really helped me because I imagined that I could draw when I arrived, but Dr. Ellis revealed to me the errors of my ways and helped me to not just draw the subject I was looking at in a formal sense, but to see that it was as an actual object in space. As Jeremy [Mikolajczak] took us through a tour of the art and design department, it was clear that there is still this emphasis on drawing at UCM.

Also, we were also grounded not just in illustration and graphic design, but also in the various technologies and history of the printing process—things like that. The fact that I was taking printmaking when I wondered how that related to illustration is a great thing for example.

So it was the grounding in basic skills as well as the diversity of subjects I was exposed to as a student at UCM that has been most valuable to me through the years.

Check out more of Mark's wonderful work at MBISCHEL.COM!!