Marc Roman

About the Artist

I have been painting for over 30 years, beginning in my mid-twenties as an Art Director who fell in love with illustration and then fine art painting. In my late twenties, I relocated from Washington DC to Croton-on-Hudson NY and subsequently moved to New York City for seven years with the intention of working as a graphic designer. As a self taught painter, my first paintings were landscapes much like I am painting now, painted en plein air with my easel set up along Westchester County roads and on Assateague Island Va adjacent to Chincoteague Island Va, where I have vacationed for over thirty years. When I moved to New York City I began to work from studies I produced all over the city, but I found it quicker to work from photographs I took of my favorite subject matter. I love photography also and have worked from my photos ever since. As for influence, early on it was Fairfield Porter, Wolf Kahn, Edward Hopper, the three generations of Wyeths and even John Singer Sargent. I attended every exhibit possible in the galleries and museums in New York City and Washington DC. I abandoned landscape at that time and began producing more abstract work influenced by Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and many others. This made for quite a strange brew as I attempted to pull all of these influences together, it was quite the trick! I eventually left graphic design to work in fine art galleries in NYC and finally as a museum professional in NYC and Washington DC. After all of these years of painting, I feel the biggest influence on my work has been Diebenkorn and the fauvist West Coast painters, as well as the graphic aspects of Japanese printmaking, particularly the Shin Hanga period that incorporated more modern subject matter. My main inspiration is the clash of light and shadow, color and form, the simple basics of any good artwork. I work to balance abstraction and representation, the paintings simple in means and application. Shadows and power lines separate and slice up the picture plane and the colors ring out because that's what I see, the landscape is never drab to my eyes, it is always glowing. My paintings have a graphic quality to them, I think owed to my earlier career as a graphic designer, illustrator and art director. Add to that having grown up 'reading' comic books, collecting baseball and football cards with the flat blue skies and green and white striped grasses of the playing fields behind the athletes. I returned to landscape painting in the summer of 2021 and feel as though I've come full circle in subject matter and process, fulfilling a promise I made to myself years ago to work from the photos I have taken over the years. I am at this time working on two other series of works that will be fleshed out in the coming years, some of these paintings are more abstract and others have more narrative attached to the landscapes and cityscapes.