Mark Engel
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Jun 26
- 4 min read
Mark Engel paints people to show how feelings, memories, and experiences can change how we see ourselves. His figures often look like they’re moving or breaking apart. He works with both digital tools and paint, trying out ideas and adjusting as he goes. Relationships and moods often influence what he makes. Teaching is also part of his daily work and helps him stay open to new ideas. Lately, he has been focusing on movement, rhythm, and how emotions show up in the body.
Q: What first pulled you toward using the body to explore identity—has it always felt like the right starting point?
A: I was drawn to the figure when I took my first life drawing class in college and felt a strong desire to study the human form. It felt like the most honest place to begin exploring identity because the human form is the highest material expression of the self and is constantly being shaped by experience, perceptions, memory, and relationships. The body is both personal and political, surface and depth, known and unknowable, and holds so much creative potential.
Q: When you're working with distortion and fragments, are you more interested in breaking things apart or letting something else come through?
A: It is a bit of both. I start with the figure and open it up, so to say, to expose an inner component, a distortion, or a spatial shift. I feel like I am deconstructing and constructing at the same time by taking parts out and adding them back in. Through the process I am trying to disrupt what I know or how I think things should look and make intuitive changes.
I recently started to use Procreate as a tool for experimenting with different ideas while I am painting. I find it a quick way of editing the work at different stages and trying out new possibilities for changing the direction of the composition.
Q: In “Where Light Seeps In,” how do you decide which parts of the figure to keep clear and which to let blur?
A: As I mentioned, I take away and add back in, so the distortions happen during the process. I often paint an area in a certain way and then decide later that the shape or color is not fitting and change it. I try to be detached from any specific part of the painting so that I am more open to change if something is not working. I’ve learned to let things go more easily than I used to because in past work, I would get stuck trying to hold on to something in the painting that clearly did not work. Now I find it is easier to just cut it out and keep moving.
Q: Has teaching shifted how you think about your own work—or how you deal with change in your practice?
A: Teaching keeps me in touch with the process of learning because I get to see different approaches students use to learn new skills.
There is an important awkwardness at first between the student and the new skill, which requires adaptation.
As the instructor, I am there to encourage the student to move past that initial discomfort and keep going. This helps with my own work because it reminds me that pushing into new territory requires me to adapt and work through the feeling of unfamiliarity.
Q: “Drawn Together, Pulled Apart” looks at how relationships shape us. Are there certain ones that keep showing up in your work?
A: What keeps surfacing in my work are the relational dynamics marked by difference. Relationships inherently create tension because they bring together individuals with differing experiences, perspectives, and needs and force us to confront the unfamiliar both in others and within ourselves. Our collective differences create the friction that allows us to evolve.
My paintings explore figures that are not harmonious but instead are fragmented, distorted, and caught in a push and pull between merging and holding boundaries.
My work is in part a reaction to the current political climate, where there is an increasing push toward sameness and a regressive desire to flatten nuance, reduce ambiguity, and enforce ideological conformity.
Q: As you build a figure piece by piece, how do you imagine that space between what’s seen and what’s sensed?
A: There is an interplay going on between knowing and not knowing, which creates a sort of atmospheric tension in me. I imagine the space between what’s known and what’s sensed as some sort of pressure or force that is pushing to come through.
My process begins with a loose composition to give me direction, but I always get lost between the starting point and where I end up finishing the painting. This feeling of being lost is the struggle to make what is sensed a visible part of the work. It opens the painting to possibilities beyond my initial intentions and taps into a deeper, unconscious part of myself that is less tethered to the material world.
