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The Indiana Daily Student

arts

The Venue hosts painter, sculptor Mark Blaney

Mark Blaney stands in front of his favorite work "She Chooses Fish". The Venue Fine Art & Gifts is hosting an exhibition of his latest work, including drawings, watercolors and small sculptures.

Mark Blaney, local painter and sculptor, has displayed work across the country — Bloomington, Arkansas, New Mexico and beyond.

His paintings, mostly landscapes and outdoor scenes, are full of vibrant colors and call upon visions of Midwestern fields.

Blaney visited The Venue Fine Arts & Gifts on Tuesday night to discuss his work with David Colman, father of gallery owner Gabriel? Colman.

The conversation began with Colman asking Blaney about what inspired him when he was a child. Blaney said long walks in the country were some of his biggest inspirations.

“When I was in my teens, I got aware of art history more,” Blaney said. “You saw adults making things like crazy in every culture. I wanted to, too, in some way, but I didn’t know how.”

Turn-of-the-century French painters provided templates upon which he would base his earlier works, Blaney said.

“I took my cue from Rembrandt, his landscapes,” Blaney said. “He would take a reed pen and ink and roam around Holland, just absolutely stunning drawings. So I started to do that, my own variation of it a little bit. We had flat landscapes, it looked like Holland in a lot of ways.”

Blaney said he was fortunate to be surrounded by art hubs in Detroit, Chicago and Toledo, Ohio, which he visited often throughout his artistic beginnings.

The artists were mature, he said, in that they had large bodies of work to display at each locale. Their dedication motivated Blaney to start filling up notebooks and journals with his artwork and further hone his skills.

Blaney also answered questions from Colman’s wife, Michelle Martin-Colman, about the transition of his style from the obscure to the everyday.

“When did you develop that style?” Martin-Colman asked, pointing to a large vista. “Like, had you done other paintings that evolved into that?”

“I’d come back to this,” Blaney said. “I did a lot of abstract work. I was into sort of conceptual work for a while. That’s something you could hang on a wall and experience for two hours then walk away from it.”

Blaney advised those interested in pursuing art as a full-time career to start small: make miniature versions of the work you intend to create then scale up in subsequent drafts.

Colman discussed at length the different styles of painting — acrylic, watercolor and oil — Blaney has experimented with in the past.

“It’s more pleasurable with oil,” he said. “It’s fluid, and yet it doesn’t absorb into the paper or canvas.”

The Venue is also displaying a few of Blaney’s sculpted pieces. Blaney said he wants his work to capture one moment and preserve it for ?all time.

“That’s the only narrative I want is that odd little abstraction of human interaction, kind of like at a bus stop,” Blaney said. “Just for a moment there, they had one purpose. They may not want to be there, but they’re ?interacting.”

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