The Most Cake// Art Party… meet the artists – Mark Karl Hughes
Next up in TMC house of fun is the superbly talented, award winning Mark Karl Hughes. Mark studied at the prestigious Central St Martins College of Art and Design, famous for such notable alumni as the late Alexander McQueen and M.I.A. Not content with just art and illustration, Mark has also carved a career for himself in fashion design and launched his very own hat collection last year. He is the 1999 winner of the Nia de Yorke Prize for Fashion Illustration and has clocked up a substantial number of air miles teaching the various aspects of fashion in such places as Italy and China. His most current body of work, Gay Illustrations, can be found on Facebook.
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Girls girls girls and not a sign of Elvis taken from Gay Illustrations
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Who are your inspirations?
Picasso, Matisse, Jean Cocteau and James Bidgood.
What motivates you?
I love film and I am mad about faces. I love the photography of Richard Avedon and it has greatly influenced my work. In 2004 I went to Shanghai for two years to teach Fashion Design. I don’t know how that happened, one minute I was here the next it was a chloroform hanky and suddenly I’m on a plane full of live chickens – just kidding! I’m not sure what motivated me to go but I went and it was an experience. Apparently I am a “free spirit”, or so I’ve been told. I wouldn’t really say I was though as to me that conjures up the image of a woman in a floaty cheesecloth dress.
Johnny Hazard taken from Gay Illustrations
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What is art to you?
Art requires care and effort. To me a lightbulb isn’t art, and nor is a brick, regardless of whoever tells me it is. I really love portraiture and photography.I find the work of Richard Avedon and Henri Cartier-Besson really captivating.
If you could be any artist in time who would you be?
I would be Hans Holbein, so I could work at the court of Henry VIII
And finally, if you were a cake what would you be and why?
I would be a chocolate cake with a gooey chocolate centre, I don’t know why, but I’d definitely be a chocolate cake. Probably because what you see is what you get and the centre is just the same but with that extra touch of vulnerability.
All pictures © Mark Karl Hughes.
I love his stuff..