Mark Stock’s works draw the viewer into a vision of 1940’s Hollywood drama: romantic liaisons, murder or suicide scenes and, most famously, the butler in love are depicted in a colorful sunset palette. Stock tells these narratives with such agility because he is quite familiar with this romantic world, if mainly through his role as performer/storyteller. Stock is in every aspect of his life an entertainer. Aside from his paintings, Stock plays drums in the Mark Stock Trio at an Art Decoed club in downtown San Francisco, and executes magic tricks with ease, eliciting amazement in his friends and acquaintances. Stock also tells the most caricature-filled stories of when he worked back-stage at the Los Angeles Ballet painting sets (the inspiration for his print The Kiss), or some of his morbid family history, which has contributed to his fascination with murder and suicide. The story which recently appeared in Mark Stock, Paintings by Barnaby Conrad, Jr., is appropriate in its illustration of Mark in one of his more heroic performances. One night while walking on the beach with his girlfriend, Stock found an old treasure map (which he had painstakingly drawn and aged himself the day before). After pacing out the instructions he began to dig in the sand and, to his girlfriend’s amazement, he unearthed a weathered chest. Quite excitedly they pried open the chest to find a blanket, candle, two glasses and a bottle of champagne.
Stock tells his stories from experience and observation; with a bit of embellishment he has his audience enthralled. For his most successful series, The Butler’s in Love, Stock often uses himself as a model, identifying with that lovelorn figure on a most personal level. We appreciate these prints because of a quality that is lacking in much of the cinema that inspired their conception; the artist is in earnest.
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