Interview with jade van der Mark
Capturing the Pulse of the City: An Interview with Jade van der Mark
1. What drives you to capture the energy of city life in your paintings?
The city, to me, is both a stage and a mirror. When I lived in London, I was bombarded daily by a visual overload shop windows selling desire, people clad in designer labels as if wearing armor. Now based in Paris, I experience a similar intensity, though more subtle and poetic. There’s a different light here one that fuels inspiration on a profound level. What draws me in is this constant stimulation, this density of experience.
The city is a choreography of anonymous closeness a place where people press together physically, yet remain emotionally distant. I don’t paint the city as a landscape, but as a sensation a living organism where the individual often dissolves into fashion, thought, and consumption.
Jade van der Mark painting in her studio, photography by Mauritzio Rellini
2. How do you balance chaos and composition in your large-scale works?
I deliberately seek tension between order and disorder. My canvases are often crowded, populated with figures so tightly packed they seem ready to vanish into the crowd at any moment. Yet within that visual overload, I work with strict rhythms of color, form, and repetition.
My background in fashion design plays a key role here: I learned how to tell a story through texture and detail, without needing words. Every brushstroke has direction, every shape its counter-shape. I build up layers as if dressing a body—layer by layer until the canvas begins to speak back to me. That’s my boundary: when the painting starts revealing something I didn’t know myself.
Jade van der Mark photographed by Alex Walton
3. How does your everyday life in the city influence the rhythm and emotion in your work?
Every day is an act of observation. I study how people move on the metro, how their eyes lock on screens, how they stroll in flowing dresses, take selfies in shopfront reflections. I notice how their body language shifts when they pass a boutique window.
In many ways, I feel like a silent chronicler much like Proust—gathering small details to reveal the larger truth. Paris is not just my studio; it’s my mental landscape. It’s where I collect, observe, and ultimately compose. The rhythm of my work mirrors that of the city: chaotic, fragmented, but charged with an undercurrent of raw emotion.
Jade van der Mark working in the studio, photography Alex Walton
4. If time, space, and budget were no obstacle, what would your ultimate public project be?
I dream of creating a monumental artwork that wraps around the façade of a department store or fashion house a mural that deconstructs the building rather than glorifying it.
A space of consumption transformed into a mirror of introspection. Imagine large, grotesque figures staring back from the wall not as advertising, but as reflection. Inside, there would be a labyrinth of paintings a sensory journey filled with scent, color, and texture. A kind of temple of awareness, where the viewer doesn’t just look at the art but encounters themselves through the stories of others.
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