Mark Loughney’s Selected Works explore a variety of complex aesthetic content by way of imagination and abstraction of the natural world. Many of the pieces balance this thematic intensity with a degree of humor. Mark creates these pieces using a variety of media, including acrylic, ink, oil stick, oil pastel, graphite, charcoal, colored pencil, conte, and collage.

Some drawings stand out for their bizarre imagery. Each piece begins as an idea hatched upon paper from an initial abstract composition. Then, these abstracted forms slowly transform into a gallbladder, a foreleg, a backbone, a river, or other strange visuals. Other snippets of absurdity also crawl about Selected Works. A common motif across Mark’s artwork is the botfly: a pupa that represents a transitional life stage. The botfly’s black and white stripes allude to the uniform of a prisoner, yet it seems ready to bust out of the insect’s shiny chitinous exoskeleton with innate joy.