Mark Wearne – Artist Biography

Mark Wearne is a contemporary artist who explores the emotive power of impressionist abstraction. Born in Cornwall and trained in Interior Design at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham (1979), Mark’s creative journey has evolved from architectural precision to exploration in paint, from structure to sensation.

For many years, he worked as a freelance architectural illustrator, working on large UK and international contracts including Harrods, Selfridges, Hyundai Department Stores and Heathrow Terminal 5. He also put much creative energy, as a founding organiser, into Rhythms of the World, the popular world music festival in Hitchin. He designed stages, posters and programmes and instigated the Street Art Projects. These involved local schools in creating public art for the festival most notably the Dream Catcher, a monumental installation involving nine primary schools, transforming Windmill Hill into a colourful canvas of collective imagination.  

He attended the year long Defining Practice course at Newlyn School of Art in Cornwall and three abstract landscape courses.

Mark works mostly in acrylic and mixed media. He approaches a painting as a form of improvised performance, combining observation and memory, known technique and experiment to create an intuitive and often unplanned semi-abstract response to a landscape or place.

In pursuit of this ideal he works from his studio in the loft of his home in Hitchin. He is inspired by the wildness of the Cornish coast and the abstract expressionism of the St Ives School artists but the interplay of light and architectural form, intrinsic after years as an illustrator, also inform his work.

Mark continually challenges himself to reinvent and reimagine, trying something new in pursuit of meaning in paint.

Exhibitions and awards:

Solo Exhibition ‘Off the Road’ Hitchin Museum (2000)

Winner of the Wynd Gallery Artist of the Year award 2025

Make Space Gallery, Hitchin, Sept ’25

Solo exhibition ‘Adventures in Paint’ at North Herts Museum, Hitchin, November 2025

Ongoing exhibitions at The Wynd Gallery, Letchworth

Mark has also exhibited at the Ayot St Lawrence Art Show and Broadway Open in Letchworh.