2023 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow: Mark Ostapchuk

Banner image: Ferric Consult (detail), 2025. Intaglio, 9 x 12". All photos by Russ White unless otherwise noted.

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This is the second in a series of articles profiling the six distinguished artists chosen as 2023 McKnight Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant program for mid-career artists in Minnesota that is administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The 2023 cohort includes Tia-Simone Gardner, Kaamil A. Haider, Keren Kroul, Sieng Lee, Mark Ostapchuk, and Lindsay Rhyner.

Their two-year fellowship will culminate this spring with a McKnight Discussion Series:

Thursday, March 27, 2025: Adriel Luis (curator and artist) in conversation with Kaamil A. Haider, Keren Kroul, and Mark Ostapchuk

Thursday, April 10, 2025: Katie Pfohl (Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Detroit Institute of Art) in conversation with Tia-Simone Gardner, Sieng Lee, and Lindsay Rhyner

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Photo by Rik Sferra, courtesy of MCAD.

 

In 1955, Billie Holiday recorded a slow, gorgeous rendition of what was, at the time, a popular jazz standard: “What’s New.” The song had peaked at number two on the charts when Bing Crosby sang it nearly twenty years earlier, in 1939, but, no surprise, Billie Holiday’s version hits a little different.

“What’s new,” the lyrics begin, Holiday finding an extra syllable in that first word as her voice drops in from on high. She holds the “new” for a few smooth seconds of sweet vibratro before asking another question: “How is the world treating you?” You soon realize that the song is about running into an old flame and playing it cool, but trying to suss out whether they’ve been thinking about you, too. We only get one side of the conversation, though, and by the end, it’s clear that this love is unrequited. This is what they call a torch song.

Torch songs feature singers still “carrying a torch” for a lover they’ve lost or were never able to have — a sweet bit of melancholy to make heartbroken music fans feel less alone. Holiday even put out a whole album of torch songs called “Music for Torching,” editing the well-known idiom down to a single, delicious gerund, as though Lady Day is inviting you to join her in actively setting fire to all your scornful, erstwhile beloveds.

For painter Mark Ostapchuk, jazz singers like Billie Holiday inspire his approach to pictures as much as anything you’d find in an art museum. Over the course of “What’s New,” Holiday enunciates the title phrase a little differently each time, going from warmly detached to plaintive to, in the song’s final line, resigned — as if to comment on her heartbreak, “what else is new?”

“That’s one of those standards that when it was new, it did not have the punch that her interpretation gave,” he tells me, sitting in his studio, surrounded by his paintings. “I think that was a song that she made her own, at this intersection or dialogue between the sublime and blasé, the corny and heartfelt.”

 

Ostapchuk's studio at 2010 Artblok in Northeast Minneapolis.

 

In a similar way, Ostapchuk develops his paintings out of an iterative approach to simple constructions. His studio walls are peppered with wildly colored abstractions consisting of the same shapes and symbols repeated over and over again: stars, plants, circles, and stripes all cluttered together, cast in harlequin colors like ruddy oranges and Gatorade yellows, sectioned off into compositions halfway between mosaics and tapestries. Still, just as quickly as he brings up Billie Holiday, he is wary to draw too direct a comparison to her artistry. “I like the way jazz musicians improvise, how the elements of a band talk to each other, how the soloists take turns and reinterpret the theme of a song,” he says, before adding, “I’m not so pretentious to think that I have a connection to that, but it's something I think about a little bit.”

This humility animates his work. Even the relatively small pieces he has up in his studio, some no bigger than a foot or two in each direction, all still seem to take the task of painting very seriously. Ostapchuk will live with these works for long stretches of time, sometimes years, adding and tweaking — wrestling with them — until finally calling them done. In the finished works, he’s looking for the connection between what we often take to be corny and what he knows to be heartfelt. “I’ve always been interested in generic decorations like scallops and fifties houses and everyday patterns,” he says. “I think that that desire for decoration is kind of what separates us from other animals. And it’s one of reasons we bother to make pictures.”

In the work, these decorative elements sometimes layer on top of each other, sometimes dance alongside, or simply stand shoulder to shoulder, like perps in a police line-up. “The way I use shapes seems to be like an ensemble of characters,” he explains. “I don't know how clearly that conveys to an audience or a viewer, but it is there for me.”

 

Top: Bad Travelers, 2022. Oil on wood panel. Image courtesy of the artist's website. Bottom: Standards, installation view, 2012. Minneapolis Institute of Art, MAEP exhibition. Image courtesy of Form+Content Gallery website.

 

There is a great density to his compositions, a kind of pulsating cacophony. In a 2012 MAEP show at Mia, Ostapchuk showed much larger canvases, some as big as five by eight feet and each one a vibrant criss-cross of meandering stripes and crazy colors. The controlled chaos of a thick urban street scene comes to mind — a sort of Broadway Boogie-Woogie by way of Wesley Willis.

His more recent paintings, though smaller, are more spacious, with larger sections of solid color in between his stripes, circles, and recurring characters. But the cacophony comes roaring back — smaller still — in a suite of black and white intaglio prints spread out on his worktable, the product of a recent residency at a print studio in Berkeley. Unlike in his paintings, whose multitude of layers is most apparent along the thick, crusted edges of each surface, the history in his prints has nowhere to hide. His recurring characters overlap with a certain mad precision, crunching on top of each other like layers of sediment on a canyon wall, every little mark the artist made left out on view. Some of the prints give your eye an exercise, darting from shape to shape, tone to tone, working to make sense of the story; others are more simple, showcasing a single shape engulfed in little swirly marks, clearly mechanical in origin, forming a sort of electron cloud around the image’s nucleus.

 

Top: San Pablo Ledger, 2025. Intaglio and Chine colle, 17" x 9". Bottom: Ashby November, 2025. Intaglio and Chine colle, 4 x 5". Both works completed at Kala Art Institute Artist Residency, Berkeley.

 

Repeated in one print is an eight-pointed star, sort of like a puffed up pound sign. I ask if it is meant to be a flower or a star, and he replies simply, “It’s from my great aunt’s embroidery.” After his mother passed away, he inherited an embroidered shirt that his grandmother’s sister had made. “I didn't know that my grandma even had a sister,” he says. “I like that embroidered shirt a lot, and so I lifted those patterns to see if I could work them in.”

These characters slowly take up residence in his studio practice, appearing in and disappearing from these prints and paintings throughout the long process of building pictures. They’re secretly narrative, these pictures, containing humble, ambiguous little snippets of Ostapchuk’s daily life — personal mementos from people or places he’s known, physical processes like cutting templates for his shapes, or trains of thought that might appear out of nowhere.

While working on one of the prints and plugging in a familiar star shape, he says, “somehow I started thinking about the creation psalm and working in intaglio… It's the psalm that talks about creatures great and small. And there's been cheesy, cheesy, cheesy illustrations associated with it. But there's one line, that God wears light like a garment. And the idea of light revealing itself to the world is very dramatic and evocative. I’m trying to work out how you can get the light to work from those black inks.”

He’s referring to Psalm 104, a song of praise that mimics the structure of the creation story in Genesis 1. Here, the singer is remarking on God’s generosity in creating a natural world that sustains life so well, providing water and food, shelter and sunlight. Like Ostapchuk’s paintings, the psalm is ordered and organized but dense with detail. Near the end, a verse reads “May my meditation be pleasing to Him,” and I wonder if this isn’t its own kind of torch song, really — an earnest bit of worshipfulness from a speaker in supplication. But for Ostapchuk, the beauty here is really in the language and the imagery. He isn’t so concerned with explicit religiosity; his interest is more grounded in the here and now.

“I like to think that spirituality is how we engage with each other in day-to-day life,” he says. “It's living in the spirit of humility and forgiveness. It's acknowledging the least of us. It's how we live. But painting is negligent compared to what we do for each other. In some ways, painting’s not a decadent activity, but it's part of the material, the physical world. It ain't that important.”

 

Newer works (and works in progress) in Ostapchuk's studio.

 

Physicality is unavoidable in his work. Each piece asserts itself as an object, from the substrates they are painted on — sometimes chunky blocks of plywood, other times thin sheets of masonite or plexiglas — to the painted surfaces themselves, which have been sanded, scraped, and imprinted with patterns, sometimes from simply being blotted with paper towels. The thinner works hover off the wall, their crisp edges gunked up by layers of paint like the imperfect deckling on hand-made paper. Chunkier pieces sit heavily, decisively next to them, waiting for Ostapchuk to decide they are finished before peeling the blue tape off their sides.

“I spend a lot of time preparing the surface, making the background,” he explains. “It's this bit of a ritual about preparing the rectangle that I'm going to put paint on, and then I'll make some marks.” This current series of works fall under the moniker Surface Inquiries, like a sort of excavation in reverse where the build-up of colors and characters is what reveals the answer.

Where the objects on the wall are solid and resolute, the pictures themselves are much more metaphysical. They call to mind the mysterious, tangled geometry of Jasper Johns, or the vignettes of found architecture in Sean Scully’s photography. Hints of Marc Chagall’s cartoonish mysticism hum around some of the stars, while the carefully slapdash organization might remind you of a satellite view of farmers’ fields.

There’s a wild sort of miscellany to much of it, each painting titled something cryptically specific: Lost Guests, Two Kites, Jinx Salt Crown. “I don't mean for the titles to sound evocative or ambiguous, but they are,” he says, with characteristic modesty. “It's kind of funny that paintings sometimes have a lot of history, a lot of layers. They're very seldom completed, and when I’m sitting with the titles, I'll throw something at it and see if it sticks.”

 

Kasper and Beginnings, 2025. Oil on wood panel, 24 x 24"

 

While we talk, I find my eye tracing the red line of six four-pointed stars weaving in front of and behind six more of the same shape the color of a hazy grape bruise, over and over again. I’m trying to make sense of it, and the picture won’t let me.

As in traditional Islamic art, there is a spirituality to these geometries, however commonplace some of their origins may be. “I think maybe I am deliberate about simplicity in my shapes,” he says. But not all of them are purely decorative in origin. In the piece I’m staring at (above), underneath the grid of red and purple stars are three more characters: a hunched figure Ostapchuk describes as Casper the friendly ghost; a coiling yellow snake form; and a third right in the middle that shows up over and over again in his work: a small sprouting plant.

“I've been gardening for the past few years,” he explains. “When my mom got old, I would help her in the garden, and I hated weeding. And then when she passed, I continued gardening, and when you garden, you learn to identify what’s sprouts or weeds fairly early. In my doodles and sketchbooks, a sprout would come up. Then I saw a woman in a coffee shop that had sprouts tattooed on her arm, and I thought, damn, if those are good enough for her to put on her skin, I can use them in my pictures. Why not?”

The sprout is a character of earnest humility and stubborn resilience. It makes me realize there is a component of faith to doing any kind of work at all, the belief that a seed planted, watered, and tended will eventually make its way up out of the soil, the way a painting will emerge on a canvas, sometimes only after years of dutiful attention. The symbol of the sprout, Ostapchuk says, “is an acknowledgment of a daily activity that’s important to me and common to other people. The sprout, to me, does talk about origins, beginnings.”

I think it also talks about work. The sprout and the ghost and the star and all the rest of the ensemble show up again and again because the painter shows up again and again. “The ability to go into the studio and work on pictures in my sixties is the one constant,” he says with gratitude. There may be more constants than that, if we’re being honest — Ostapchuk’s work is iterative and repetitive, building on itself like a jazz lyric or a psalmist’s prayer. The question is what can be new about something so familiar? He’s not asking flippantly or cynically, the way we roll our eyes and sigh “ugh, what else is new?” He’s down there working in the dirt, trying to find out. ◼︎ 

 

Paintings hanging in Ostapchuk's studio.

 

To see more of Mark Ostapchuk's work, visit his website or Form+Content Gallery, or follow him on Instagram @huck_ostap.