Mark Dye loves art, literature, and staring into a camera with his hand on his chin.
His visual art style began as early as elementary school where we drew mazes for his friends to complete. Eventually he learned he could hide names and pictures inside the detailing.
His two sisters (both now art teachers) also introduced him to drawing mandala like pieces by simply folding a piece of paper in half twice and drawing details starting in the center and moving outward.
You can see both of these influences converging in the early, unfinishing drawing from high school pictured below.
Early Works
Early Piece, circa 2001 - “The Warrior”
This piece was begun as a mandala where you see the bilateral symmetry of the chest design, but quickly became a figure drawing.
Although the black background bares a similarity to Mark’s current style, the detailing has a much broader diversity of design thickness and shapes.
The blue figure, especially in the chest area, also has much more negative, white space present than in more current works.
Mark hopes to return to this level of variation in future pieces.
Notice the club, diamond, and spade/heart hidden in the details of the upper legs.
These early drawings from around the same time reveal one of two possibilities. 1) He maintained a precociously mature sense of minimalism when it came to his color palette. Or 2) All he had around the house was a sharpie four pack with black, blue, red and green, so he grabbed those and went with it.
The world may never know, which.
gradually adding color
“The protector” - 2003
“The destroyer” - 2003
“The Protector, ” “The Destroyer” and “The Creator,” form a trio of mythological creatures.
“The Protector” was a commission from a close friend in high school and includes some of the signature hidden images that make Mark’s work stand out today. Among others, you can see the Star Wars Imperial logo, the “one ring,” the name “Lindsey,” and the American Flag.
The eponymous protector is being attacked by various beasties emerging out of the black background, but has a kind of force field that keeps him and others safe.
“The Destroyer,” is a giant snake with different segments of his body representing universal stages of life: birth, happiness, hardship, death and rebirth. The circle on his head is an individual soul that can be seen in most of the segments until at last it is the head of the angel that makes up The Destroyer’s tail.
“The Creator” is a giant insect that takes all the chaos and weaves it into different worlds, taking disorder and turning it into structure.
It’s all very profound.
This piece saw the introduction of several other colors, still completely done with Sharpie Ultra Fine tipped markers.
You can also see that the uniformly packed fields of color are much closer to the contemporary drawings, though some of the shapes are still more “hollow” than you would see today, with much more white in the middle such as the triangle in the lighter green world.
“The Creator” - 2003
Other early Pieces
These additional pieces from Mark’s high school years show a varying degree of success, and all were still done exclusively with Sharpie markers. The “T.O.K.” Piece was selected for a collection of poems his high school class did. The Butterfly is especially terrible and shows a lack of forethought about the low contrast between the butterfly and the background. Most of these were done just for fun.
An explosion of color
At some point around 2004, Mark got his hands on a box of Prismacolor ultra fine-tipped markers, and he was off to the races. These drawings were done during his senior year and into his college years. The portrait of him with his sisters, and the portrait of Willy Wonka show an early nervousness and downright refusal to attempt facial representation. Keep in mind he didn’t consider himself an actual artist until 2020; he mainly thought of his early works as a form of glorified doodling that most anyone could do.
diamond burst
This piece was one of Mark’s earliest commissions from a college roommate. He appreciates his early and current supporters!
