Posted inArt

Mark Greenwold’s Passion for Details

In Mark Greenwold’s pencil drawing “Josie” (2015), at least three people and an oversized cat are gathered in a room under what looks like a skylight. A bespectacled man on the drawing’s right-hand side is wearing boxer shorts and a t-shirt, his erect penis poking through his shorts.

Posted inArt

Brave Heart: The Recent Paintings and Drawings of Mark Greenwold

Ever since Mark Greenwold first began exhibiting in 1979, a lot of gibberish has been written about his highly detailed, modestly scaled oil paintings of disquieting domestic situations. One critic, willfully forgetting that there is a difference between fact and fiction, viciously attacked his first solo exhibition — it was comprised of a single large oil painting, “Sewing Room (for Barbara)” (1979) — because the artist depicted a man who resembled himself murdering a woman that looked liked his wife. What would this same critic have made of the six-year-old James’ sudden murderous fantasy about his father in Virginia Woolf’s novel, To The Lighthouse (1927)? I doubt she would have excoriated Woolf.  Denouncing Greenwold was easy — he was unknown at the time.