About the Artist

Mark Friday-Lewis is a Cincinnati-based artist whose work moves fluidly between abstraction, figurative painting, and plein-air landscape. His creative practice is rooted in observation, but it’s equally driven by intuition—where a mark, a shift in color, or the rhythm of a composition can lead to unexpected meaning.

Mark’s plein-air studies, often painted on site at places like Spring Grove Cemetery and the neighborhoods of Cincinnati, are meditations on light and structure—how the seen world can dissolve into color relationships and atmosphere. His figurative work, influenced by life-drawing practice and archetypal psychology, explores the human form as both presence and metaphor. In his abstract and mixed-media paintings, gesture and geometry intersect; layers of acrylic, charcoal, and pastel reveal a push and pull between chaos and order, movement and stillness.

Across all modes, Mark’s philosophy centers on process and play. He believes in painting as a conversation with uncertainty—where discovery happens through making rather than planning. Iteration, material experimentation, and the willingness to let an image evolve are at the core of his approach.

Guided by the conviction that meaning emerges through form, Mark sees art as a bridge between perception and emotion, intellect and intuition. Whether painting from life or imagination, he seeks to create work that invites viewers into that same state of attentive curiosity—a moment of pause in which the ordinary becomes luminous.