The most immediately striking quality of Demsteader's large-scale oils is their use of darkness. Figures emerge from backgrounds so deep, rich browns and blacks built up in layered paint, that they seem almost lit from within, isolated by light rather than placed in a scene.
It is an approach with a long history: the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and Rembrandt used exactly this technique to draw the eye toward a face or a gesture and away from everything else. In Demsteader's hands the effect is intensely contemporary, but it draws on the same fundamental principle: that contrast between light and shadow does not just illuminate a figure, it dramatises one.
In Antigone, a 150 by 150 centimetre oil on canvas, a figure in a vibrant yellow dress faces the viewer with a tilted head and an open, relaxed expression. Light radiates from her face and from the warmth of the dress, while the rest of the figure gradually dissolves into the surrounding darkness. The canvas is large enough that this dissolution happens slowly, across real distance; you are aware of the figure simultaneously as a complete person and as something being absorbed into the paint around her. It produces a peculiar stillness. The figure is present, direct and fully there, yet the darkness pressing in from every side gives the painting the quality of a moment held rather than a scene described.
Flight achieves the same quality through a different pose. Here the figure extends horizontally across a 120 by 150 centimetre canvas, reaching forward in a quiet gesture, her head resting on her elongated arm. A soft pink dress flows behind her, dissolving at the edges into the dark atmospheric background in the same way Antigone's dress does. The figure at the centre is sharp and present, the periphery giving way to paint and air. The title suggests movement, but the painting depicts something closer to its opposite: a suspension between motion and rest, the moment before or after flight rather than flight itself.
This is a recurring quality in Demsteader's oil paintings. The figure is always caught at a point of stillness, not the stillness of a posed portrait, which is a constructed and somewhat artificial condition, but the stillness of someone paused in the middle of something. The darkness around them removes the contextual information that would tell us what the something is. What we are left with is the figure alone, carrying the full weight of the painting's mood, which is why the gesture, the angle of the head, and the relationship between the body and the surrounding space matter so much in his work.
The Riverbank, at 160 by 160 centimetres his largest sized canvas, which introduces landscape into this grammar. Rich earthy tones are balanced against accents of blue in the water and surroundings; a central figure rests poised at the river's edge. The setting is more legible here than in the darker studio compositions, but the same principle holds: the figure dominates, the surroundings recede toward the atmospheric, and the painting fuses what has been called mythic atmosphere with immediate emotional presence. The word poised in the description of this painting is well chosen. Poise implies equilibrium and the awareness that equilibrium might not last.
The studies
Alongside the large oils, Demsteader produces a substantial body of work in pastel and collage, smaller in scale and considerably more intimate in effect. These are described as studies, and they bear a relationship to the finished canvases: Study for Flight, Study for Crossing, Study for Autumn Fields, but they are complete works in their own right, with their own emotional logic and their own demands.
The medium is part of what makes them distinct. Pastel laid over collaged paper has a rawness that oil on large canvas does not. The mark-making is visible, immediate, and relatively quick. You are aware of decisions being made and left standing rather than refined. In Study for Amy, the pastel and collage work in muted earthy tones, the pose is contemplative and turned inward, the face only partially visible. The layering of soft pastel over collaged paper gives the surface a raw, tactile quality that the oil paintings, for all their atmospheric depth, replace with something more deliberate and constructed.
The face, in many of the studies as in the oils, is averted or obscured. This is not incidental. The face is where a viewer goes first, instinctively, to read a figure: our previous blog on figurative art noted the involuntary human tendency to seek out faces before anything else. Turn the face away and that instinct is redirected. The figure still compels attention with the same force, but the attention lands differently: on posture, on gesture, on the quality of stillness in a body that is not quite still. The result is that Demsteader's figures communicate a great deal through means that most figurative painting reserves for the face alone.
The studies are also, in practical terms, the most accessible entry point into Demsteader's work. The major oils are more significant investments that, as wall art, make significant demands on a room. They are paintings that change the space they occupy. The studies are more accommodating, and they represent some of his most direct mark-making. Collectors who begin there frequently find themselves returning for the oils having spent time with the studies understanding how Demsteader's formal instincts work.
Where to see the work
At Hancock Gallery in Newcastle, we hold original works by Mark Demsteader across both bodies of his practice: the large-scale oils and the smaller studies. For those interested in contemporary figurative painting with real presence and technical ambition, his work repays a visit. Browse online or if you’re interested in looking for fine art in Newcastle art galleries, visit Hancock Gallery to see the canvases in their full impressive scale.
Explore Mark Demsteader's artist page and available works
