Mark Wilson 

 Introduction

During the seventies, Mark Wilson actively exhibited paintings and drawings in New York. His work was deeply involved with geometric imagery that had a distinctly technological flavor. In 1980, Wilson purchased a microcomputer and began to learn programming, with the goal of creating artworks. Since 1980, all of his artwork has been generated with software he has written. These computer generated works have been widely exhibited in the U.S. and internationally. He participated in many of the most influential exhibitions of computer art; including seven SIGGRAPH art shows, "Computers and Art" at the IBM Gallery in New York City, "ArtWare" at the Hannover CeBit, and Nokia's Gallerie Atelier E in Zürich. In 1985, Putnam published his book, Drawing with Computers, of which Scientific American remarked, "...perhaps the path no one quite knows toward the new art we hope for one day." In 1995 he published "Lines:Vectors", an edition of laser prints. "Vectors:Textures" was published in 1997.  More recently, Wilson has been working on a series of ink jet prints using a large format archival printer.

The National Endowment for the Arts awarded Wilson an Artists' Fellowship in 1982, and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts has given him three grants. Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, awarded Wilson the Distinction in Computer Graphics in 1992. He has taught, lectured, and has been visiting artist at a number of institutions including the University of California at Santa Barbara, Yale, Carnegie-Mellon, and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Wilson's works are in numerous public, corporate, and private collections. Among them are the Chemical Bank, IBM Corporation, Apple Computer, UniSys Corporation, United Technologies, Mobil Oil, Prudential Insurance, Ziff-Davis Publishing, The Virginia Museum, Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Sao Paulo, Philip Johnson, and Ivan Karp.

Born in Cottage Grove, Oregon in 1943, his undergraduate work was done at Pomona College. At the Yale Art School, he studied painting with Jack Tworkov and Al Held, and received an M.F.A. in 1967. He lived in New York City for three years and then moved to West Cornwall, Connecticut where he presently lives with his wife, Pamela Pray Wilson. They have three grown sons.