Mark Pulsford is a Scottish artist who currently lives and works in St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex with his wife, singer-songwriter and band leader Sarah Jane Morris. Pulsford studied at Edinburgh College of Art (1968-9) and under the tutelage of Carole Robb and Rose Wylie in Roy Oxlade’s department at Sittingbourne College in Kent (1972-5).
His father was the artist and educationist Charles Pulsford. His mother was the stained-glass designer Bronwen Gordon. His brother is the London-based painter Benedict Pulsford.
Pulsford was born in Edinburgh in 1951, and still feels a close affinity to the city and culture of his origin. He has devoted himself to the practice and modalities of visual response, both as a teacher and in his own creative life. He has taught in secondary schools, in colleges of art (KIAD and London Metropolitan U) and as a faculty member of the Rome Art Program, the (now world-renown) all-scholarship course of intensive study in the streets and cultural sites of Rome, which was founded by Robb assisted by Pulsford in 2009.
His own recent practice has developed directly from seminal teaching/learning experiences in Rome and Florence with RAP, and in Venice, where he has researched the principle of transcription (exemplum ex originali) with the works of Tintoretto (In Presenza di Tintoretto RAP lecture, 2022).
Chasing The Moon / Inseguendo la luna / A' ruith na gealaich
ChasingTheMoon is Pulsford’s project using moonlight as the sole light-source for the making of large scale watercolour paintings. Pulsford has collaborated with film-maker Rod Morris (Roadfactory Films) to tell the story of how seeing-by-moonlight changes the artist’s eye, and how images made through the filters of moonlight are different from conventionally conceived visual art. Note the swan’s flight feathers cut to make pens as illustrated below, the painting tools used in this process.
‘Experimental’ is often used in art criticism as a signifier of trial but not of achievement. To call a painting experimental is to imply its failure (or ‘non-success’). Pulsford makes experiment central to his practice and demonstrates it as a (supremely demanding) route to ground-breaking success.
