Mark Levin

Mark’s aesthetic is derived from nature’s small wonders, flowers, leaves, fruit, the occa­sional vegetable as well as the female form. He master­fully takes these shapes and wraps them in sump­tu­ous curves and graceful currents.

Mark creates with solid woods for their intrin­sic value, viril­ity, and rapid­ity of execu­tion. The grain and beauty of the wood have little influ­ence during the initial design process. He visu­al­izes new work in matte black and believes that if a piece has a pres­ence draped in black, is executed with deft­ness and passion then the inner beauty of the wood will take flight.

Most of his work is built using the stack lami­na­tion process where smaller pieces of wood are glued together to form much larger blocks or ​“blanks”. The stack lami­na­tion process provides strength, scale, and endless artis­tic possi­bil­i­ties. Once the blank is completed, he roughs out the work with chain­saws and auto­mo­bile disk grinders. As the final form emerges, he tapers to more deli­cate power tools and finally hand tools to define the details and sumptuous curves.

Mark learned wood­work­ing in junior high school indus­trial arts and had his first commis­sion, a blanket chest, while a high school senior. At college, he studied under Bobby Falwell, a grad­u­ate student of Wendell Castle. Imme­di­ately upon grad­u­at­ing college Mark opened his first shop in Evanston, Illi­nois. In 2012, after a few decades, detours, and zigging when he should have zagged, he set up his current shop in Albu­querque, NM.