Thank goodness some of Wendy Mark's best works are the size they are! When I go on a trip I pack a heady group of them in my luggage. Wherever I am, I have my own gallery—peaceful and contemplative and full of artistic energy. I go even further than that. I have several of her diminutive pieces stashed in my wallet. When I want an occasional artistic hit, I open it and leaf pleasurably through several small and highly charged masterpieces by this gifted artist, it's amusing and fulfilling to be able to make a bus or subway car into an art gallery. I am especially enamored with the one inch by one inch "The Figure You" with its bursting red and white-rimmed clouds of joy. I look at it and am lifted very high. At times, flying alone in my plane, I pull out one of her clouds just before entering a real one. I have a similar sense of anticipation and excitement with both.
Her latest works demonstrate a further maturing of her subtle skills and are all about deliciously contradictoly sensations-the ephemeral in her pieces, some deliberately murky thoughts as well as crystal realities. Super evocation! In every work there's a masterful combination of delicacy and force and weíghtiness and light-as-air freedom.
Her works are satisfying in both form and color. But I think she may secretly like the colors and the sense of cosmic light over form. Her colors are romantic, poetic, and at once ethereal and down-to-earth, of this world and out of it. Each time I look at her works I find something new and more provocative. One day I'll swear by the pale ones with their milky strength, another I prefer the moody and dramatic darklings, especially those with their splendídly gloomy backgrounds. Then I'm hooked by the rich russets and golden reds and then the peaches, and finally the startling blues with accents of magenta and lavender. They are ímpastos snatched from paradise itself.
Wendy Mark is developing a fine universe of forms from pinballs to horizons and clouds to automobiles and airplanes and landscapes and ancient personages. Her landscapes seem to be imbued with the entire history of landscape since the seventeenth century. I have a weakness For the so-caIled "Rembrandt" series with people dressed in ancient-looking clothing and wearing turbans looking like Saul and other old testament characters. Especially romantic and compelling are the car series, particularly the pink one and the dark one with the ghostly yellow shining on the inside.
It doesn't matter what the work is, every resplendent one crackles with energy and drama and embodies a simply astounding sense of release and celebration.
Thomas Hoving Former Director Metropolitan Museum of Art March 1998