Fragmented: The Art of Mark Youd
Mark Youd lives and works in an old farmhouse near Glasgow. He trained as a draughtsman and, following a successful career as a designer and technical illustrator, Mark developed his personal artistic practice; exploring psychology through portraiture.
Drawing, printmaking, painting and sculpture are the forms he uses to investigate the boundaries and intersections of philosophical, scientific, spiritual and artistic understanding as they relate to the human portrait.
Mark creates work in series, allowing ideas to develop over time and across disciplines. The Fragment series is concerned with our relationship to the earth and seeks to chip away at the traditional portrait in order to reveal evidence of the soul. Work in the Psyche series is a direct expression of the forces acting between subject and artist. These pieces are spontaneous, unpremeditated, raw. The immediacy of the creative act dictates the outcome of the artwork in order to channel a vision of the sub-conscious.
In a physicalist interpretation of life, we are bags of molecules, collections of atoms formed in supernovae billions of years ago, that, given just the right universal conditions, found themselves on a planet that is just the right distance from a star that facilitated evolution of myriad species from a common ancestral cell. Is consciousness - and therefore the sub-conscious mind - an emergent property of physics, chemistry and biology, or are we spiritual beings in fragile, awkward, fleshy, short-lived hosts and it is, in fact, the energy of the soul that drives creativity and it has left its imprint in Mark’s work?
In the summer of 2025 Mark was diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy, a form of temporary facial paralysis - the irony of the portrait painter unable to move half of his face was not lost on him. A sudden awareness and concentration on the muscles and nerves of his own face, and the disconnect between the intention to move and the ability to control, caused a shift in emphasis in his work from the study of others to a new series of introspective self-portraits.
He continues to employ the surrealist techniques of automatism and blind painting - where only the model is observed during creation of the artwork, not the artwork itself - but now his gaze is turned exclusively inward, and his actions seek to record glimpses of personal noetic experience.
