Introduction
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). He also shared a studio (1970-71) in Saint Paul, Alpes Maritimes as assistant to the Dutch post-surrealist painter Robert Floris Van Eyck.
His father was the artist and educationist Charles Pulsford (see webpage on this site Charles Pulsford 1912-1989). 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. 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). He is currently involved in further research centred on the Museum of Roman Antiquities (Palazzo Massimo) in Rome, where he is investigating the ideal garden of the Empress Livia and other examples of the paintings of antiquity.
His research in the area of transcription is represented here below, with images 10/11 and 13/14. Please refer to PORTRAIT STUDIES page for examples and details regarding life- and photo-portraiture (see images 7 and 9).
Chasing The Moon is Pulsford’s project using moonlight as the sole light-source for creating 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 unique process.
DEFINING PROCESS ART
Avant Arte’s glossary of terms defines Process Art as ‘where the creative process is a significant element in the finished piece, often making the act of creation itself the subject.’
Pulsford unpacks the subject further:
- The unique value of process art is to make every artwork a creative experiment.
- Creative experiments, unlike empirical ones, are designed to produce new, unforeseen outcomes every time. (Empirical experiments are validated through exact repetition. Repetition and replication have their places in art, but not in the creative act.)
- Creative experiments must contain a series of constants (the unchanging rubric).
- They should also contain a series of variables, some controlled and others random (beyond regulation).
- The constant elements and the variable elements must be logged faithfully, so that the process, different every time, may be analysed and the serendipidous (the chance elements) be assessed and understood.
- Thus the process is sustained as living and evolving and ‘fecund of outcome’, simultaneously directed and unpredictable.
- The design of process is indivisible from the artwork itself (qv Avant Arte’s definition).
- Communication of the artwork must therefore include communication of process.
(in sequence order from the top & L to R)
- 1. The Full Moon – stock photo licenced by Alamy.
- 2. Painting of the news of the child (September 2024) detail.
- 3. August moon over the English channel (2023).
- 4. Mark Pulsford with smiling dog photograph by Cherry Tufik (May 2022)
- 5. Moonlight reflected in water droplets (April 2023)
- 6. Swans’ flight feathers cut as painting quills - The heaviest extant flying birds, swans shed these beauties every year, providing the most capacious fluid reservoir of any quill.
- 7. Noah Zelo in a red scarf; oil on black acrylic ground, 2010.
- 8. Pulsford in his studio photograph by Petro-Nelise Trichardt (August 2020).
- 9. Mara Ukairo with folded arms; red conté pencil on paper (2023).
- 10 & 11. (R) The imagined garden of the Villa di Livia; study in situ of 1st Century BCE Roman fresco (June 2022)
(L) Digital image showing the same part of the garden fresco, Palazzo Massimo, Rome. - 12. Mark Pulsford in 1971; photograph by Billie Thune-Larsen.
- 13. & 14. (R) In presenza di Tintoretto one of 100+ studies all completed in situ at the Scuola Grande di S Rocco in Venice. (image 13)
(L) Digital image showing horses and riders on the extreme right of Tintoretto’s great Crucifixion (detail) corresponding to the area of scrutiny in image 13. - 15 Pulsford in his studio with moon paintings; photograph by Rod Morris (May 2021); (below).
