Three years ago, Mark Cottman took a chance. Now, on the eve of a major exhibition at a local art gallery, he's taking a deep breath. Cottman organizes his dreams by levels, and with this show, he's ready to climb.
Eight years into a career as an architectural engineer, Cottman decided there were too many creative muscles he had yet to flex. Architectural design had become too rote. "It was like eating with a fork instead of your hands," he says.
While friends and co-workers questioned his sanity, Cottman traded in his home in Randallstown, his SUV, his designer dress shirts and his retirement fund for art supplies, computer equipment, a minivan and a run-down brick rectory on Guilford Avenue.
He was going to be an artist. "When the smoke cleared, he was in a whole new world," said Linda Richardson, owner of Sassafras art gallery and Cottman's girlfriend for eight years.
Saturday, Cottman will open a show at Sassafras, 3200 Barclay St. While he's shown his work at festivals, fairs and even back yards over the last few years, the Baltimore native senses this show could take his career places it's never been. Most of the pieces in the exhibit have never been displayed; Cottman wanted to save them for the right moment.
With that in mind, Cottman plans to saturate Sassafras with original landscapes, portraits, nudes, still-lifes and abstracts, offering the public as many works as the gallery can comfortably hold. "Each piece has to breathe," he said.
And breathe they do. Cottman's work throbs with color. Musicians such as Jim Morrison, Sarah Vaughn, Janis Joplin, Sonny Rollins and Macy Gray explode in skin tones of blue, green and yellow. Their identities are unmistakable, but its more than physical accuracy. It's the pulsing patterns of a billowing Jimi Hendrix shirt or the sweeping green lines of a Billie Holiday gown that really make the paintings sing.
In Resurrection, an enormous aqua-blue Jesus, framed in pastel-flecked brickwork, rises in an explosion of color.
Throughout the four floors of his studio, Cottman's paintings mask yellowed wallpaper and wrinkled brickwork. They sit everywhere, carefully stored along baseboards or perched on easels, like bottles of fine wine aging gracefully, waiting for the right moment to be opened.
Cottman is flattered when visitors instinctively touch his work, and he has no qualms about explaining his brushstrokes. He often writes poems that coincide with certain pieces. "It's not a spectator sport anymore," said Cottman. "It's going to pull you in."
Clasping white sheets of paper as he mills around the studio, Cottman thumbs through the pages to read a piece of social commentary. His deep voice consumes the room as it ricochets from one canvas to another. "What is Black Art?" he asks, reading in a forceful tone that must be audible from the sidewalk. "For the life of me, I can't tell the difference between a Black, Red, White, Brown or Yellow Person's painting of a flower.
"I don't do Black Art," the piece concludes, "I'm an Artist who is Black."
"See," he says, grinning as he points to a tall nude in one corner. "I don't discriminate."
Perched depicts the back of a white female figure. Like his portraits, Cottman paints his nudes with vibrant pigments. The figures are lush and approachable, inviting one's cheeks to flush more than blush.
"That one almost killed me," Cottman said, shaking his head at another work's teasing pair of female eyes. The Seductress hides a joker under one arm; the rest of a deck of cards is strewn around her body. She's one of the few nudes he created without a model, and he refuses to part with her.
Cottman said his works physically consume him. "Sometimes I get in my bed and lie in the fetal position for hours," he said. Such was the case with Cataclysm, an abstract cosmic landscape flaked with gold dust.
At 43, Cottman is exploring his emotions and experiencing some of the rebelliousness of the adolescence he never had. His mother died when he was only 13, causing him to grow up quickly, taking care of his little sister and brother. He married at 16, became a father by 17 and, when his father died, was left parentless at 20.
Cottman attended college while serving in the Air Force, graduating from Morgan State. Divorced for 10 years, he raised a daughter and two sons, now in their 20s, and today, he calls himself "a big kid with experience."
Cottman says he wants to dismantle the walls of elitism that surround the city's art scene and encourage environments that welcome both artists and audiences. His Sassafras show, he says, will offer everyone, be they veteran art critics or first-time visitors, an opportunity to explore, to form their own opinions of his work.
"The public makes up its own mind," he said. "If you need me, I'm back in the corner, but you've got to work this out for yourself."
Exhibit
What: Works by Mark Cottman
Where: Sassafras, 3200 Barclay St.
When: June 22 through Aug. 3
Admission: Free
Call: 410-366-6467 or go to www.art-4u.com