When Mark Allnutt first visited New York as a student, he was immediately struck by the city’s structured layout. While walking the streets and avenues, their right-angled predictability instilled in him a sense of equilibrium and stability. Every pavement crack, each textured surface, all the individual cobbles, he realised, was a microcosm of the city in its totality. This initial impression was reinforced when he viewed the city from the heights of the Empire State Building and the World Trade Centre, looking down on its meticulously ordered grid. The experience left a lasting impression, shaping both his aesthetic sensibility and his approach to picture-making.

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If it articulates the ordered structure of modern cities, Mark’s work also acknowledges the fragmentation and chaos of urban life. He celebrates the innumerable and interdependent urban units (streets, parks, houses, plots of land etc.) which form the social organism of our municipal environment. His intricate line drawings are not maps in a literal sense but attempts to evoke the sensation of navigating a cityscape. No specific street, road, town, or city is depicted. While individual routes or tracks rarely carry significance in themselves, once coupled with and attached to others, a sense of coherence emerges, transforming his pictures into something greater than the sum of their parts:

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My aim is to create abstract, map-like works that explore our almost unnatural and disruptive desire to construct and urbanise the landscape. Using a process as laborious and determined as that of a bulldozer, I hope to find beauty in the increasing number of scars composed of concrete criss-crosses and quadrilaterals which have invaded our world. On its own, each shape I create may be meaningless. Coherence only begins to emerge when these shapes are connected with one another, resulting in a series of bird's-eye reflections on modern urbanisation and so-called progress.

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Mark is deeply engaged with spatial manipulation, yet he deliberately avoids conventional pictorial techniques such as linear perspective or vanishing points, which create illusions of depth on a flat surface. His art remains resolutely within the confines of two dimensions. When it does engage with three-dimensionality, it is not through illusionist trickery but through the actual physicality of his materials (built-up pigmentation, impastoed layers, textured brushstrokes) that his work gains a tangible, sculptural presence.

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Much of Mark’s technique and picture-making practice demands painstaking precision, requiring meticulous draughtsmanship. His process includes tracing out specific lines, weaving intricate webs and covering large areas with minuscule forms. What might seem like an arduous, even mind-numbing task is, for him, an essential and deeply satisfying part of the creative process – something he relishes and savours. This notion echoes the conviction expressed by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, when he observed that:

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Sheer plod makes plough-down sillion shine.

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Mark’s compositions may possess an emphatic sense of regularity, yet they are neither predictable nor purely repetitious – far from it. Each is carefully structured, organically growing and developing from out of a single seed in the manner of a Fibonacci sequence. Yet, with subtle shifts here and slight variations there, the eye remains engaged, continuously exploring the picture’s surface. Some feature an all-over, intricately worked texture where no detail dominates the webbed expanse of activity. Others employ slabs of pigment, expressively textured which, nevertheless, conforms to stringent compositional constraints. More latterly, his paintings echo the aerial views from a plane. In fact, Mark always selects a window seat on a flight to study the quilt-like formations of the fields below.

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Colour, always secondary to form, nonetheless plays a pivotal role. It is never decorative, nor is it merely ornamental. Primary colours are deliberately excluded in favour of subdued umbers and ochres, meticulously balanced against whites and creams. Cinnamon and sepia, buff and beige, walnut and chestnut – each hue subtly synchronised into a harmonised whole. This restrained, almost prosaic palette perhaps reflects something fundamental about everyday existence – our humdrum habits and ordinary occupations as modern city dwellers.

Gerard Hastings, 2025