Artist - Mark Shortland

I studied art and design at both school, and university and can state without a shadow of a doubt I was not the best, in fact I struggled to be average with most mediums. Having tried pretty much everything I found I was good at and enjoyed making things in three dimensions and so enrolled at university on a model making course. This meant someone else drew it and I just had to make it. Perfect!

As a 2D artist I’m not sure my technical ability has changed a lot over time, but art is subjective, it does not necessarily need to be the best, it just needs to touch people and fill them with emotion.

While moving house I uncovered some of my old work from both foundation course and college and thought it would be fun to show how I started…

Foundation Course

Still Life

Coke Can

Pritt Stick Photography Project

HND Course

Having left college and spending ten years as an outdoor instructor, an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the UK left me searching for a new career and with no explanation necessary I began my journey as a professional magician.

Winning the British Magical Championships in 2005 led me to performing on cruise ships. Due to the amount of spare time on ships, it has often been said you either learn a new skill or drink!

Being a non drinker I resurrected my artistic background and joined an art class. These are some of the pieces I did during the two week cruise.

Although these are not the greatest I very much enjoyed creating and finding the art bug, I just needed to find a medium I was happy to work in.

So I tried a few watercolour classes.

Still not great, however, continuing to work outside of class hours I started to create a cleaner more precise style which appealed to my design brain.

This was beginning to work. The realisation that watercolours do not stay where they are placed helped me to understand in order to keep my ridiculously neat art style I would have to change to a medium that stayed put. Acrylic was the next choice.

I wanted a project, something I could get into. I needed a subject to paint, how about playing cards? There are 52 of them and would keep me going for a while. Painting what I thought of when a particular card was mentioned. Start the project very literally, I worked through the 52 canvases, each painting becoming more abstract and taking on the characteristics of real world forms and styles.

During the period to completion, I thought the canvases would look great as actual playing cards creating a tiny art gallery. So I painted the Joker too and this project became the first in my ’53 Series’.

Before I moved this was all the canvases linked to create a striking art installation.

In the bottom right there are three extra panels. The two rabbits were painted as art thieves to be included in the deck of cards and used in a magic effect created for the deck. The 53 was done for no other reason than to make the installation symmetrical.

’53 – A Collection of Art’ was printed in a limited run of 100 decks. In 2019 another 100 decks were reprinted, this time with frames around each painting.

53 - A Collection of Art

This is the deck of cards produced from the playing card artwork.

53 Magicians

The second project ’53 Magicians’ this was to be a deck of cards showing 53 magicians who are recognisable by either their costume or signature trick. This deck was created more for the magician, who would recognise most of the magicians, who although being famous in the world of entertainment, are less well known to the general public. To start I wanted to use the rabbit character I created for the Joker in ’53 A Collection of Art’ dressed in each costume. This was my first attempt using Piff the Magic Dragon’s costume.

With the desired end to the project being a deck of cards, I thought this might be a bit busy, so I lost the background and concentrated just on the costume.

First was Penn and Teller, not being a portrait painter, I did a stylised face that worked well with the helmet and goggles. This face style continued easily through Piff and Mac King. Then I hit a snag, how do I portray performers who do not have a head or face covering? The decision was made to continue without facial hair, which meant a number of prominent magicians e.g. Max Maven, known for their individual look were illiminated as it was their hair that made them unique.

53 Magicians

This is the deck of cards produced from the playing card artwork.

53 Films

The third project ’53 Films’ was very similar to the magicians project, but this time more for the general public, featuring iconic film and movie costume.

Removing one of the indices from the card allowed for a larger image of the character.

53 Films

This is the deck of cards produced from the playing card artwork.

Click on the logo to check out all the art from Mark's Daily show