MARK WEARNE

I studied Interior Design at, the then, Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham graduating in 1979. I
practiced as an Interior Designer later becoming self employed as an Architectural Illustrator.
I retired three years ago.
Living in Hitchin my wife and I helped form the Hitchin and Letchworth Oxfam Campaigns Group.
In 1992 we had the idea of running an annual world music festival as a campaign event.

We called it Rhythms of the World. Over the years this grew into a huge free weekend festival of World Music that took over the streets of the Town.

At it’s peak it had eleven stages including St Mary’s Church.
To increase community involvement and to introduce visual art into the Festival I developed the
‘Street Art Projects’. These involved local schools in painting banners, making papier mache
sculptures and culminated in the ‘Dream Catcher’ a huge artwork involving nine primary schools
that covered most of Windmill Hill. During this time I also designed the posters, programmes and
graphics used to promote the Festival.
In 2010 I designed and supervised the refit of the Hitchin Oxfam shop.

Exhibitions
Solo exhibition at Hitchin Museum called ‘Off The Road’ in 2000.
Exhibited work at Trelowarren House near Helston in south west Cornwall.
Exhibited work at ‘Creations’ the retrospective exhibition of the late seminal product and vehicle
designer Tom Karen at Letchworth Museum in 2022.

I started painting for pleasure in my newly constructed art studio in the loft of our home in Hitchin. Interested in developing an approach to abstraction and, with a long attachment to Cornwall, I attended three courses at the Newlyn School of Art.
Cornwall, with dramatic weather, intense light and ever changing sea is rich in inspiration for
artistic abstraction and some of my work is of Cornwall and influenced by St Ives School artists.
But, living in Hitchin, I have tried adapting my approach and technique to depict something of the very different atmosphere of my home town.

My other work is quite varied and experimental, in the quest for meaning in paint.