Mark English
Artist | Professional | Traditional Art

United States

Born in Hubbard, Texas in 1933, Mark has come a long way from his early days of picking cotton and painting signs on windows of small-town businesses. At a young age, he watched painters decorate and advertise the upcoming rodeos on the windows of cafes and hardware stores in central Texas. Painting signs seemed much easier and a lot more fun than working in a hot, dusty field picking cotton from sunup to sundown. From this humble beginning of teaching himself to paint, his evolution has traveled perhaps the furthest distance possible.
He attended the University of Texas and graduated from The Art Center College in Los Angles in 1960. In 2001, Mark was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree from The Academy of Art, San Francisco. Moving to Connecticut in 1964, he began his meteoric rise as one of America's top magazine illustrators, working almost exclusively with the largest publishers on the globe.
Mark English has been one of the leading illustrators in the US and abroad for three decades. His unique style is easily recognizable in such publications as McCalls, Time, Sports Illustrated, Redbook, Atlantic Monthly, and others. He has won literally hundreds of awards for his work and has been the most awarded illustrator in the history of the Society of Illustrators in New York. His client list includes such notables as IBM, U.S. Park Service, RCA, GE, Ford, GM, and Honeywell.
In 1995 Mark began painting for galleries in earnest. Since that time and before, he has participated in countless exhibitions in galleries all over the world. His never ending search for new and exciting combinations of compositions and materials have fueled his imagination and those of his eager clients. A rich alchemy of unusual supplies have contributed to a type of work that is unique and original. Transparency and translucency reign with rich colors and atmospheric perceptions of space and scale.
Mark's work appears in many private collections and has been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States, Canada, and Japan, including the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C.. In 1983, Mark English was elected to The Illustrators Hall of Fame in New York, joining such notable illustrators as N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, and Frederick Remington. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri with his wife, Wendy. He has four daughters; Donna, Stephanie, Emily, and Sarah, and a son, John.

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