American Artist

Texas artist Mark Haworth plans his
paintings so they express the character,
story, and language of the landscape
and so viewers feel the emotional impact
of seeing nature through his eyes.
LEFT
Spring Thunder
2008, oil, 24 x 36.
Private collection.
BELOW
River Boulders
by Allison Malafronte
2006, oil, 30 x 40.
Private collection.
Improving
Landscapes
OPPOSITE PAGE
The Crossing
2005, oil, 30 x 20.
Private collection.
With
Solid Plans
good landscape painter has the ability to see beyond
trees, water, and sky to the hidden rhythms and subtle
nuances of nature, and a great landscape painter can
record those observations in a way that instantly transports
viewers to a specific moment in time. Mark Haworth takes this
one step further by not only allowing viewers to behold the
beautiful landscapes of his native Texas with him but also to
experience what he felt while painting them. “I try to get down
to the real substance of a landscape—what moved me to paint
it, what makes it poetic,” Haworth explains. “When someone
looks at one of my paintings I want them to feel as if they have
been to that place before or could imagine themselves there.
There’s a powerful connection that happens between nature
and the artist who paints it, and there is an equally powerful
emotional response when the viewer feels that connection.”
Landscape artists of the past who did this best are
unsurprisingly the painters who have had the greatest
influence on Haworth’s style. George Inness (1825–1894),
Isaac Levitan (1860–1900), Willard Metcalf (1858–1925),
and Julian Onderdonk (1882–1922) inspired Haworth from
an early age with their soft, tonalist palettes, their sensitivity to the character of a scene, and the suggestive emotion
and melancholic atmosphere of their subject matter. “You
really feel the strength of nature when you look at the work
of these artists,” he says. “The viewer is able to participate
in the painting and get a glimpse of what the landscape
meant to them. By capturing a sense of place, these
painters created a feeling of awe and reverence in their
work, as if to say nature is not to be taken for granted.”
A
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American Artist
Beyond having similar
painting styles, Haworth
shares a love of music and
poetry with his hero
Levitan, and both artists
seem to have applied their
understanding of composition, harmony, and language to the landscape. “I
grew up in a very artistic
family, and my mother was
a concert pianist who
taught lessons in our
home,” Haworth tells. “I
started college as a music
major and switched to fine
art my sophomore year after having the opportunity to be
apprenticed to a portrait painter. I always thought the only
way to have a career in art was to enter the commercial field,
but when I saw this artist making a living from his paintings, I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life.”
After he graduated, Haworth was fortunate enough to
secure commissions for two years while he got his career off
the ground. Although he was doing mostly portrait work to
pay the bills, the artist’s interest soon turned to the landscape. “Plein air painting wasn’t nearly as popular 20 years
ago as it is now,” he says. “We didn’t have all the fancy
equipment today’s artists have, so I would just take a cheap
aluminum easel outside and paint around Huntsville, Texas.
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D E M O N ST R AT I O N : T H E F R I O
I learned a lot about judging values during this time and
about the importance of understanding light and shadow.
As I became more experienced, I wanted to work larger
and started doing more studio work and less plein air.”
Today almost all of Haworth’s landscapes are painted in
the studio, aided by photographs he takes of the canyons,
creeks, hills, and deserts of the Texas countryside or by the
occasional plein air sketch of the land he’s called home for
more than 25 years. The artist likes to work large—usually
24" x 36" or 30" x 40"—and he prefers to start right into a
piece without doing any preliminary work. “I keep it very
suggestive in the beginning, starting with some quick
strokes of paint that establish the placement of the perspective lines,” he explains. “I used to do preliminary
drawings and thumbnails, but I found that by the time I
got to the larger canvas the thrill was gone. Keeping it
loose and unstructured allows me a certain spontaneity
and freedom that I really appreciate as a painter. I want to
Step 4
At this point, Haworth had
blocked in the troughs and limbs
of the trees, the blues of the
sky, and the gray under the
clouds. He was now ready to
turn his attention to the
background area, accent the
painting with his darkest darks
and lightest lights, and add
textural effects with his palette
knife. “Most of the painting is
spent getting the values right,”
the artist says. “That’s the
hardest and most important
part—once you have that, the
color and finishing touches
come naturally.”
Step 1
Haworth began this painting of a landscape in the Texas Hill
Country by loosely blocking in an outline of the major shapes
using a purplish-gray mixture of ultramarine blue and
cadmium red deep thinned with linseed oil. In this stage the
artist also established the tonal shapes, working mostly on
the trees and rocks in the center.
BELOW, THE COMPLETED PAINTING:
The Frio
2008, oil, 36 x 48. Collection Whistle
Pik Galleries, Fredericksburg, Texas.
LEFT
Rockport
Trawlers
2006, oil, 20 x 24.
Private collection.
be able to work out the composition and colors as I go, not
to be confined by a detailed outline.
“Once I get through the initial stage of putting down
a simple drawing, I start blocking in large shapes of
local color to get the values worked out, keeping the
paint thin and working from the center outward,” the
artist continues. “With the tonal shapes established, I’m
pretty much at the halfway point, and from there it’s just
adding the light and dark accents that pull the piece
together.” The artist notes that most of the dark colors
on his palette are semi- or fully transparent, and he uses
those colors thinly for his shadow areas while using
thick strokes of opaque color for his lights.
“I mainly stay in my middle tones throughout the
painting and save the dark and light accents for the end,”
the artist explains. “I work in grays for my middle-dark values, and my favorite mixture for this is ultramarine blue
with cadmium red deep or Indian red. This is a versatile
combination that can easily be bent warmer or cooler—by
adding more red or more blue—and if I need to gray it
even more, I can add some yellow ochre (for a duller tone)
or cadmium yellow (for a richer tone). For my middle-light
values, I work with green mixtures made from ultramarine
blue or cobalt combined with cadmiums. If I want a more
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American Artist
Step 2
The artist continued pulling the various pieces of the painting
together in this step, still concentrating on the trees and rocks
in the foreground and leaving the cliff in the background area
for a later stage. He stayed in his middle-value tones as he
painted, using various mixtures of warm and cool grays, and he
also started to work on the water in the middle ground.
Step 3
In this stage the artist worked more in his middle-light values,
using green mixtures of ultramarine blue combined with
yellow ochre or cadmium yellow light to paint the shapes of
color in the shrubbery. Haworth also worked a little more on
the water area while keeping the background bluff untouched.
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March 2009
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RIGHT
Desert Autumn
2007, oil, 30 x 24.
Private collection.
OPPOSITE PAGE
Desert View
2007, oil, 30 x 40.
Private collection.
ABOVE
RIGHT
Last Light
El Mercado
2008, oil, 24 x 30.
Collection Whistle Pik
Galleries, Fredericksburg,
Texas.
2006, oil, 16 x 20.
Private collection.
neutral green, I add cadmium orange or red, and for a more
greenish yellow—such as for the bright greens of spring—I
add cadmium lemon. I use yellow ochre, which is a nice grayyellow, mixed with olive green for a more subdued green.
With all my mixtures, I try to keep them loose because I like
to see some purity of color in the brushstrokes.”
Haworth explains that as an artist working in Texas—
where the light tends toward silver, creating a lot more
grays—he sometimes feels the need to push colors slightly to
establish the effect he is going for, but in general his palette
is more natural than vivid. “Colors get a little more intense in
the fall and spring here, but usually there are a lot of grays
and greens,” he explains. “In the fall I like to go up to Lost
Maples State Natural Area to paint the maple trees, and
when I’m here I find that my palette keys up to more intense
reds and oranges. In the spring I sometimes paint the wildflowers—we get these magnificent bluebonnets that cover
the hills and look like a solid sea of blue from a distance—so
in the spring my palette also becomes more intense.
“I mainly paint the landscapes of the Hill Country and
the Trans-Pecos region—known as West Texas—where
there are a lot of mountain scenes and desert areas,” the
artist continues. “It’s a very rugged and beautiful area, but
there’s also something very forbidding about it.” Desert
View appropriately captures both the appreciation and
apprehension Haworth sometimes feels while painting
here, in what the artist refers to as a metaphor for life. “You
can see in this painting that although there are these
rough, harsh elements in the foreground—such as the
prickly cacti and jagged rocks—there is also this quiet,
comforting canyon in the background that awakens your
curiosity. You want to go back there, but you know that in
order to reach it you will first have to get stuck, stung, or
stabbed. There’s a little bit of an allegory here that applies
to other areas of life: Sometimes you have to walk through
the valley to get to the mountain.”
Fortunately for Haworth, his artistic journey has been
filled with plenty of mountain-top experiences. From his
upbringing surrounded by an encouraging artistic family, to
his chance opportunity to study with an accomplished portrait painter, to his fortuitous encounter with an arts patron
early in his career who kept commissions coming while
Haworth honed his craft, it seems this artist was born to
paint. And what he hopes for most is that when viewers partake of the scenes he captures, they will see not only the
poetry of the landscape but also of life.
■
About the Artist
Mark Haworth grew up in Texas in a large artistic family that encouraged creative pursuits of all
kinds. His mother was a professional pianist, his
older sister was a commercial artist, and his older
brother and sister-in-law were soloists with the
American Ballet Theatre. Yearly visits to New York
City with the family found the artist walking the
halls of libraries and museums, where he first discovered the work of the Old Masters. After starting college at Sam Houston State University, in
Huntsville, Texas, as a music major, Haworth
switched his major to fine art during his sophomore year and began painting professionally upon
graduation. Today Haworth enjoys a successful
career as a landscape painter, having participated
and won awards in several important exhibitions
and sales, including those organized by The John
F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in
Washington, DC; Gilcrease Museum, in Tulsa,
Oklahoma; the National Museum of Wildlife Art, in
Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Oil Painters of America;
Arts for the Parks; and others. His work hangs in
both private and public collections, and he is represented by Whistle Pik Galleries, in
Fredericksburg, Texas, and Texas Art Gallery, in
Dallas. For more information, visit
www.markhaworth.com.
Allison Malafronte is the associate editor of American Artist.
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American Artist
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Reprinted from American Artist: Copyright © 2009 by Interweave Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
March 2009
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