Mark Lovejoy (Born in 1952) was born in Alpine, Texas. By age twenty he had moved 19 times and lived in every state in the western US except Idaho and Oregon. At seventeen he hit the road and never turned back. Lovejoy hitchhiked several times throughout Europe, across the US, through the Middle East and to India – Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Florence, Mikonos, Corfu, Istanbul, Izmir, Kandahar, Tehran, Khyber Pass, Kabul, Srinigar, Delhi, Peshawar, Reykjavík,… Upon his return to the US, he worked with an oil exploration crew out of Kemmerer, picked fruit in New Hampshire, Wyoming, moved furniture, did some roofing in El Paso, and worked in a pasta factory in Denver, lived in an old mining camp in Western Montana, irrigated fields, milked cows, headed for Alaska, returned to Seattle and in 1978, landed a job running a printing press in Seattle. He didn’t like the ides of having a boss so he started his own printing business which, due to insufficient funds, he closed in 2001, and then got a job managing someone else’s print shop for seven years. Lovejoy has been compared to Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’Keefe. He is inspired as a photographer by painting and painters. His initial series of abstracts was originally titled “homage to painters”. His greatest painters include Twombly, Pollock, Klee, Basquiat, Kandinsky, Thiebaud, Rauschenberg, Hockney, van Gogh, Hopper, Dali, Picasso, and so on. Photographers whom he considers to be major influences are Irving Penn, Moholy Nagy, Ansel Adams, and Richard Avedon. He is also influenced by advertising and fashion photography in general. Many galleries like to stock framed Mark Lovejoy art because of their attractiveness and quality.
