About Mark Holcroft

I have painted in some way for most of my life. I paint still-life and landscape pictures, and I paint mostly from life using a limited palette of four or five oil pigments. I like the immediacy of wet-in-wet oil painting, so my pictures are often realised quickly in one or two sessions. I paint on gessoed board, canvas board or stretched canvases, which I make myself, and I finish the painted surface in either a matt wax-based varnish, or gloss dammar varnish. I don't attempt to emulate specific painters, but am inspired by the Dutch Old Masters and the work of John Singer Sargent, Lucien Freud and Gerhard Richter.