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Mark Rathmell was born in 1966 in Bradford in Yorkshire in the United Kingdom. He began drawing at the age of four, influenced by the boy who lived next-door-but-one, whose mother was an amateur artist.
A shy child who often daydreamed, Rathmell did badly at infant and junior school (his teacher once made him run around the playground during a lesson to make him ‘wake up’), and drawing soon became the only thing he was known for being ‘good at’.
As he reached adolescence, Rathmell became fascinated by modern art, which he could only see in prints in the library books he borrowed form Bradford Central Library most weekends. He developed a love for the work of Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso and the Bradford-born artist David Hockney. At the age of 16 he cleaned out a disused horse’s stable on his grandfather’s farm, filled it with painting materials and a camp bed and spent the summer painting and sleeping in there, only leaving to go to the farm house for meals.
Upon leaving school, after a disastrous few months in an office, Rathmell’s mother finally relented and allowed him to apply to art college to do a degree. This he did, moving to London to study at Camberwell College of Art, but a problem was beginning to emerge. As he grew older and his hormones kicked in, the musical influence of the Grandfather on his father’s side of the family began to affect him and Rathmell became obsessed with the idea of doing music. Also this was the time of the emergence of the YBAs, the era of installations, figurative art had begun to seem irrelevant and unfashionable and Rathmell wanted to try something else for a while anyway. He knew he would come back to it one day. After obtaining his degree and staging his first solo show, Rathmell disappeared to Japan where he formed his first band but, after the band split up, and not having the money to finance the recording of his musical ideas, he became a drunken English teacher.
Returning to England Rathmell was finally able to experience creative satisfaction and some recognition musically with his final band, the Who Boys, but after recording 300 tracks, nine albums, several videos and 40 podcasts, Rathmell had finally had enough of making music and his original obsession with art returned with a vengeance. He gave up music permanently, started drawing and painting again, and had his second solo show in 2009.
"I was born on a farm in Yorkshire and became interested in drawing at an early age, mainly out of jealousy towards the boy who lived next door but one. His mother was an amateur painter. Mine was a waitress. He gave up drawing but I kept on with it, and became interested in modern art during my early teens. When I left school, after a disastrous year in an office I did a degree in art at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in South London. However, at the end of the course I started doing music, as I had music in me which I think came from my Grandfather on my father’s side of the family. My Grandfather on my mother’s side was a farmer. So I stopped doing art for many years when I was younger, though I always suspected that I’d go back to it, as indeed I now have, and I intend to do it for the rest of my life.
I produce one finished image every day and shall be doing so for the next year, because if I fail to email a photograph of a finished image to two friends by 10pm on any one night I will immediately owe them £100 each – I made a bet with them in order to force myself to be productive. All of the work you see on my Saatchi page is the product of this bet.
I've been affected by a variety of artists, from Chaim Soutine, Richard Gerstl, Jean Dubuffet, Georg Baselitz, Craigie Aitchison, Milton Avery, Leon Kossov, Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Asger Jorn, Marlene Dumas, Maggie Hambling and others.
The mediums I work in are ink, water, acrylic paint, oil paint, oil pastels and pencil crayon
The pieces are usually A1 and bigger. Some are A2, but most are larger.
I’d like to work on a much larger scale, but I can’t at the moment since I don’t have
enough space. My living room is my studio. Luckily my wife doesn’t really mind(well, she did mind the other day when I accidentally knocked a palette covered with wet acrylic paint on to the carpet, but otherwise she’s surprisingly tolerant of the mess I create)."
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