Meet Mark Risius

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mark Risius.

Mark Risius is a multi-passionate creative and has been proficient in various creative endeavors throughout his life. Art was his first creative outlet throughout grade school with a particular love of drawing cats and kittens (how adorable:-) with pencil.

With Junior High came the affliction known as puberty and the inevitable horrific realization that he was leaving childhood behind and moving into adulthood. Never having seen or even known a remotely happy healthy adult, he vowed to stay young at heart and maintain some semblance of a playful, creative life (his current residence has two art studios, a music studio, and a badminton net in the back yard). Around this time he learned to skateboard which taught him to operate from a place of passionate fire and creative drive and to explore new possibilities. He developed these lessons while in high school and learned to play the drums while playing in a garage band. He picked up the brush and art again in his senior year to paint a red rose for his girlfriend at the time.

Mark continued with music and in his early twenties began painting on sandstone. The oils on sandstone are in a style he calls Lucid Naturalism as the pieces remind him of the intense vibrancy and color of a lucid dream or the world seen through the lens of particularly potent hallucinogens (of which his participation thereof can neither be confirmed nor denied). The subject of these Lucid Naturalism Sandstone pieces were usually composed of a stark white leafless birch/aspen tree, their trunks dividing into hundreds of intricate wind blown branches over a moonlit sunrise sky silhouetted with cliffs, mesas and spires.

While Mark loved the final product of the Sandstone pieces, the execution was “as tedious as doing taxes by candlelight” catalyzing him to try something that would be the exact opposite: abstract painting. His first one pretty much sucked, but he did improve it quite a bit by snipping letters from magazines and gluing them over its surface, it read: “I sent my kid to art school for six years and all I got was this crummy painting.”

Mark’s next step was to go big, really big at 60” x 96”. At this size, a smoothly blended abstract painting was fun to create with long broad blending brushstrokes that were much more fun (yay!) than tedious tiny branches (boo!). These are a style Mark calls Soulscapes. “If New Age music were art, it would look like this.”

Later, Mark had the urge to do something more constructive with his art- and so was born the idea of cutting up paintings into strips and remounting these over one of his custom made frames and so was born The Woven Collection. The Woven Collection is, according to Google, a wholly unique style of oils on canvas that exists nowhere else in the world, maybe even the entire universe (like, whoa dude). Mark has developed this Woven Collection into circular (Say what?) and oval shapes (saweet!) and is exploring more floral shapes as well (no freakin’ way!)

You can find Mark’s work in his Boulder, Colorado home studio. Or year-round at The Denver Art Society in Denver as well as other local venues. Please email for a private tour at markrisius@gmail.com You can also find his work online at www.markrisius.com

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Hmm well, I guess my most honest and colorful answer would be to say that my life has been a Beautiful Shit Show®™. At the age of 16, I went into the living room where my parents were sitting and grabbed the big medical book that was sitting there on the coffee table and went down into my room to do some research. I’ve always wondered what they were thinking at that moment- if they were wondering if I was looking up an STD or something. I came back up a short time later and told them that I have depression and asked if they would send me to see a psychotherapist. In my long journey to heal depression, I’ve seen a few therapists and learned many alternative healing modalities such as transform breathwork, intuitive energy work, emotional Journey work, kitten juggling, and more recently even more intuitive energy work (no kittens were harmed in the writing of this sentence:-) It is only recently that I am more consistently finding relief from a life of depression and opening into a space of thriving. My most honest and colorful way to express how I feel about this: F*ck Yayuh!

We’d love to hear more about your business.
I have two businesses. My practical business and my passion business. I started Window KING Window Cleaning (boulderwindowcleaning.biz) twenty years ago with the full intention of making more money and working less so I would have time to do my art, music, poetry, improv comedy, mountain biking, travel and most importantly, personal growth. The main business I am now focused on is Mark Risius Art.

My art and especially The Woven Collection- oils on woven canvas, is wholly unique and as far as I can find there is nothing else like it in the world. No one is doing this style or technique and I am most proud of that fact, I’m pretty freakin’ psyched actually.  I will never have to sign one of my pieces and people will know who created it. That is an amazing feeling. I love art that is new and unique yet still visually pleasing.

My main gallery space is at Denver Art Society, 734 Sante Fe, Denver.

What were you like growing up?
As a kid I was super shy but also very curious about everything. We lived in a town called Olathe (Cherokee for Beautiful) near Kansas City and vacationed out to Colorado a couple of time a year either to hike ( my parents used to bribe me with M&M’s to keep me hiking) and bike (this was way before mountain bikes- my Huffy was freakin’ awesome!) or to ski (this was way before snowboards, lift tickets: $20!). We finally made the move out here the day I turned 13. I’ve had depression for as long as I can remember and it’s been a very long process of healing, at least enough to where I feel like I can enjoy my life. The best coping mechanism for depression though is having a sense of humor. (You know all of those comedians we all know and love? Most likely they suffer from some form of depression.) This led me to join the improv comedy group Mile Hi-Larity twenty years ago-(https://www.facebook.com/milehilarity/).  At first, the most difficult thing about being in an improv group was that I felt like I didn’t belong, this went on for many years but as I transformed more of my inner self, my outer world shifted to as well as my perceptions thereof and now I feel much more at home within myself and the world. What helped me to get to this brighter space in life was to do everything I could possibly do to make myself healthier in every way- diet, exercise, meditation, personal growth workshops, therapy, creative outlets, life goals, and most importantly learning not to fix, heal or try to “let go” of the parts of me that are painful but just love them exactly how they are- that in and of itself is the most powerful transformational awareness I’ve ever had and it’s an ongoing daily practice for me. My analogy for that is when your hand gets cold, you don’t cut it off do you? No, you hold it next to your body and embrace it with warmth. So it is with all parts of us, instead of amputation, choose to love and embrace and what results is a powerful transformational integration.  It also helps to cry your ass off when you need to and watch plenty of funny cat videos:-)