Mark’s passion for linocut art and printmaking spans well over a decade. Travel and popular culture often informs his work.
He is a self-taught linocut artist and you will usually find him sitting on the floor surrounded by lino shavings, listening to music!
I love the physicality of this medium. For smaller work I hand burnish using a wooden spoon. For larger prints I hit on the idea of burnishing my work upon a large homemade registration board, using an old cast iron garden roller. This is a good practical solution to those (like me!) who can’t afford a huge state of the art press.
My ongoing love affair with linocut is reflected in the many artworks often reflecting popular culture and scenes from places I’ve travelled to.
Mark also reproduces his linocut designs on to walls in the form of large murals for homes and businesses.
Wall Murals
Exhibitions
Mark’s work has featured in shows throughout the UK and Europe:
Mark James Murphy is an artist, teacher, adventurer and writer. He was born in Sunderland, North-East England in the early 1980s. He has solo travelled extensively throughout the world and in 2017 decided to leave behind his job and apartment in the UK to teach English in Vietnam, South East Asia, for almost five years, describing it as the best moments of his life so far. There he also continued developing his practice as an artist and printmaker, documenting his travels through the medium of linocut. In 2019 he fulfilled a childhood dream when he backpacked for two months throughout the whole of India, ending up in a remote village in the Himalayan foothills. He has played football with local kids in the Sahara desert, lived with Hmong people high in the mountains of North Vietnam and worked as a farmhand in Southern Spain.