L to R : Bre Pettis, Mark Wilson, Pam Wilson

Mark Wilson

Mark Wilson (b. 1943, Cottage Grove, Oregon) is an American artist who connected abstract painting to the plotter as directly as anyone. Trained as a painter at Yale — MFA 1967, studying with Jack Tworkov and Al Held — he showed geometric paintings at Hundred Acres Gallery in New York through the 1970s, then bought a Texas Instruments microcomputer in 1980 and taught himself to program. His pen-plotter drawings of the 1980s and '90s turn screen imagery into dense fields of lines, hatchings, and quasi-architectural pattern; his CTM plotter paintings (1986–92) put the pen to canvas scale, and from the 2000s archival inkjet prints extended the same systems. His book Drawing with Computers (Perigee/Putnam, 1985) taught a generation of artists to code for the pen — Scientific American recommended it — and the V&A holds thirty-five of his works. He received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2024 and keeps working.

Artist's website (mgwilson.com) ↗

11 physical works