Mark Morale

I live in Long Beach, California, home to the Aquarium of the Pacific, whale-watching tours, boating, wind surfing, and other aquatic attractions. Long Beach also serves as the southern anchor to the very dirty Port of Los Angeles. Alamitos Beach — my neighborhood beach — is quite polluted, and although I see other people in the water, I would never go in it. So, while I am delighted by aquatic life and living by the sea, I’m also constantly reminded of the threat to that life and the seas themselves. Some of these works portray the beauty of aquatic life while others reveal the damage and looming threats to those very environments.

Although I have dipped my toes in various types of art-making over the years (including previous works on canvas), I have no formal art training. After 25+ years in corporate graphics production, design and art direction, I was ready to look away from the pixels and work more tactile, more immediate, and somehow in-the-now. I started putting paint to canvas to create abstract works about these environments that I love… images that I think are beautiful and moving.

I enjoy knife and trowel work. Building layers. Trowel pulls across the canvas from end to end. I like to splatter the paint. Spray it. Drop it from above. Drag it. Roll it. Create movement. Frenetic, like rushing waters. The activity satisfies my desire to spread paint and create pictures, and I get fantasy-scapes that could be interpreted as reef-like vignettes, kelp forests, and other ocean-like environments.

I hope that these pieces successfully juxtapose beauty and damage; to make the threat to our oceans more palpable to each viewer; to drive action here locally, and of course globally. I want these works to resonate with activists as well as art lovers. I want stewards of these pieces to talk about the aquatic world, its riches and omni-importance to the Earth, and the endangerment to these environments that happens everyday around the globe.