Mark Vogel creates hard-edge, geometric abstract paintings, and digital prints as a contemporary continuation of the Op Art genre. He remains a colorist exploring the interaction of color — investigating how colors create illusions and how colors can evoke unique memories in each of us. Colors can take on symbolic meanings, such as religious or nationalistic connotations, or in everyday life as red means stop or green means go. Colors stimulate, colors relax, and when they are released from a viewer’s preconceptions or cultural constraints, they can take on new meanings. Mark enjoys the role that mathematics plays in his work, and the process of layer upon layer of colors that are applied using varying widths of masking tape to create the final result — which is something that I can’t see until the last piece of tape is removed. As a Contemporary Op Artist, Mark has been primarily influenced by the Op Artists of the 1960s and 1970s — especially Julian Stanczak and Richard Anuszkiewicz, as well as Bauhaus artist Josef Albers. I have been fascinated with the Op Art Movement ever since I bought a Vasarely poster at a psychedelic shop as a ten-year-old in the late 1960s. Mark’s paintings and digital prints rely on arrangements of shape and line, and the choice of precise colors that create structures, flickering, glowing, or a sense of perspective. One example of this perception of a structure is the effect that I call an “Asterism.” This refers to the “X” that appears to the eye but does not exist in the painting and occurs when contiguous colors interact from light to dark or dark to light. I borrowed the term Asterism from gemologists who use it to describe the “X” that appears in gems such as Star Sapphires. Mark has won numerous awards for his art, Including: Silver Award, Abstracts with Red 2022 International Juried Painting Competition, January 2022 Gallery Choice Award, All Abstraction, 2022 International Juried Online Exhibition, July 2022 Best of Show, 2022 Abstract Art Juried Exhibition The Artists’ Space Gallery, December 2022 Honorable Mention, 62nd Annual Community Art Exhibition, Lancaster Museum of Art, June 2024 Honorable Mention, 12th Annual International Juried Art Competition, Teravarna Art Gallery, July 2024 Directors’ Choice Award, Art Fluent, Juried exhibition: “Minimal.” September 2024