About my art

I am a restless experimenter, variously attracted to colour, tone, and line, and diverse media. Over the years, I have developed a few different styles and techniques. I would be unable to work to repetitive formulae necessary to create a single and distinctive Mark Pickles brand as much as I understand the marketing benefits of doing so. Having said that, I do think the highly-realistic panoramic paintings I have recently completed of Manchester are distinctive. I am not aware of any other Manchester artist who is painting, or who has painted, the city in a panoramic ‘photo-realistic’ style, à la Canaletto!

All my work represents reality and pursues Beauty, and much of it has narrative. I have never been attracted to Abstract art, Cubism, or other modern genres. However, I do like Impressionism. Although I use my own photographs as reference material, and often aim for a high degree of realism, I have no interest in rendering photographs as paintings. I do not want to be a human photocopier! Therefore, as a rule of thumb, I do not paint images that could be captured with photography and photo-editing software.

My favourite subject matter is the sky. Skies often cover over half the painting surface even in my cityscapes, and I often paint skyscapes without any reference at all to land or sea. I usually paint these in pastel from memory and imagination, inspired by skies I have recently seen, often aided by reference photos I have taken with my phone. Perhaps I should paint more skies because most of the successful ones have sold! Those I consider unsuccessful I destroy on completion. Unsatisfactory pastel paintings are not easy to salvage: although pastels are opaque, the tooth on pastel surfaces easily saturates, making overpainting impossible.

My favourite medium is pastel, although I am equally happy working in oils and other media. Some of the artworks you will see on this website have taken me several months, and others less than a day. I paint both from life and in my studio from my own sketches and photographs. My subject material includes cityscapes, skyscapes, seascapes, portraits, still life, figures, and nudes from life. Life drawing, I’m convinced, is an essential discipline for those of us whose artworks often require accuracy of drawing.

My most recent oil paintings are highly-detailed cityscapes. These paintings have been allowed to fully dry and polymerise (which can take up to a year), and I have recently varnished them to ensure longevity. They are now ready for sale and framing.

For 2026 I have decided to take a break from my self-initiated and highly-realistic panoramic work – although I would consider commissions in this style – in favour of a more painterly style, including watercolours. I intend to paint outdoors, ‘plein air’, as much as possible. I hope to add landscapes to my portfolio.

Over the years I have worked to commission and on my own initiative. I have sold privately and to corporate buyers in the USA, the UK, and Hong Kong, and, to help pay the bills, I have done much illustration work for business-to-business advertising.

Artist Biography and my Philosophical Approach

Born in 1961, I spent my childhood and youth in a coal-mining village (Lofthouse) near Leeds, Yorkshire, where the favoured career options were to work “down t’pit”, on the railway, or join the Forces. Although since early childhood I had excelled in art (and kids’ colouring competitions!), at age 16 I chose a technical career, and took up an apprenticeship in avionics engineering in the Royal Air Force. On leaving the RAF in the late 80s, I worked in aerospace, electronics, and the computer sciences. However, I have sold and gifted paintings and drawings from the age of 16, generally to colleagues and friends.

I worked full time as an artist for two years in 2011 and 2012, and was fortunate to receive three commissions to paint the City of London for the head office of an American bank based in the City. However, in 2013 I returned to my technical career, and was employed as a scientific technical writer. I retired completely from my technical roles in 2021, at age 60, deciding to dedicate the remainder of my ‘working’ life to my love of art, or, rather, all the liberal arts: I have just completed an ambitious book – 30 years in the making – that synthesises the sciences with theology, philosophy, music… in fact all the big concepts that underpin Judeo-Christian civilisation.

You can see a synopsis of my book, for which I’m presently seeking a publisher, on my writer’s blog here. Art and philosophy have long been connected of course. In the early 1990s, Dame Iris Murdoch – frequently cited at the time as “the most brilliant woman in England” – was interested enough in my theological philosophy to respond to a letter I wrote to her, and engage in correspondence. Some of her philosophy and fiction explores the phenomenon of the artist’s muse and its moral ambivalence. (In her youth, Iris herself was self-consciously an artist’s muse.) I don’t think I told Dame Iris that I am an artist; as far as she was concerned I was an avionics engineer (working for Westland Helicopters at the time) who had something useful to contribute to the field of philosophical theology. Of course, the Muse (which shares its etymology with Music), does not just inspire the plastic arts, but all forms of creativity.

Dame Iris told me that she was concerned about decline of Christianity as a moral framework for Western civilisation, and encouraged me to fly what she called, “the Platonic banner of Good”.

I do not doubt that both my scientific background, and interest in philosophical theology, influence my approach to art and what I appreciate and do not appreciate in the art of other artists. I have the Platonic view – unpopular today in the art world – that Beauty exists objectively, and that the task of art – including music – is to seek it and point to it. I think most of us at times take for granted the Beauty that surrounds us. If we stop appreciating Beauty, we risk allowing it to disappear. The English philosopher Roger Scruton, who excoriated modern and contemporary art for its ugliness, wrote in his essay on Beauty that, “Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.”

And Iris Murdoch wrote:

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”

A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), Iris Murdoch.

There are scientific aspects to realistic painting, not least the sciences of optics, colour, and perspective. In the Italian Renaissance, when understanding of linear perspective began to transform Western painting, the distinction between science and art became blurred. For the Renaissance artists, the studio was often also a laboratory, where artists (and perhaps assistants) would create their own pigments and paints, keeping the recipes secret. Some created their own camera obscura as an aid to understanding, and experimenting with, linear perspective. Canaletto for instance used a camera obscura outdoors to help him manipulate perspective in some of his great panoramic paintings of Venice. Coupled with his understanding of geometry and light, Canaletto achieved a sense of movement and scale that could not be achieved even today with a camera image. In my own panoramic paintings on this website, I have used some of Canaletto’s techniques (or at least my best guess of how he worked) with pleasing results. The description for my largest painting to date, Summer Evening in Shambles Square, Manchester, explains some of my processes, including manipulation of perspective while retaining a convincingly ‘realistic’ image. Of course, the Cubists also manipulated perspective, but what they produced is, in my view, ugly.

My studio is in south Manchester, England, where I have lived for the past decade. I generally price my paintings on the time they take me.

Would you like to commission me?

Use the Contact me page to message me if you have an idea you’d like to discuss. I am ambitious to be commissioned to paint a much bigger cityscape than any I’ve attempted to date. See the description of the Shambles Square painting to see what I envisage.

If you commission me I will draw up a simple contract with a breakdown of costs to ensure both parties know what to expect. In view of the fact that I work in several styles and media, I will make sure that we both agree the best style and medium for the project. I will require a non-refundable deposit of 50% of the quoted price, with the remaining balance due upon completion. I would only take on projects that I am very confident of handing over to you with pride. To date, I have not had a disappointed client, and have found it very gratifying handing over work that the client values as special. I have worked with corporate clients and individuals and, of course, family members, who are not only the most demanding clients of all, but never pay me!

My large highly-detailed realism of complex subjects, such as my recent Manchester paintings, have each taken several months, and I have priced them accordingly. My looser, painterly styles, such as my skyscapes, can take as little as two or three days if they go to plan!

Pet portraits in pastel take me around two days. I can work from animal photographs providing that the quality is good enough. Human portraits are more of a challenge and can take one to two weeks for pastel portraits. I have not yet attempted a portrait in oils, and so naturally I would be reluctant to do one to commission until I’ve experimented with self-portraits and portraits of family members in oils.

For human portraits, I require at least one life session with the subject. I will do some rough sketches and take photographs. The purpose of these sessions is for me get to know the subject. Only when the face of the portrait subject is familiar to me in real life do I feel confident in capturing the character and likeness in a painting.

>> Artworks by Subject.