Mark Dean Veca is a purveyor of prehistoric magic: creating space on a two- dimensional plane with a few lines of charcoal, ink or paint. He draws on paper, canvas or walls and uses simple black lines to manifest volume, space and depth. He shares his illusionary worlds and characters to express the internal and external depictions of organs and orifices and withering tendons, arteries, and intestines. It is comic and unnerving with strong contrasting palettes and patterns and odd juxtapositions of historical and popular iconography often abbreviated, disfigured or exposed. Whether large or small the work is intentionally spectacular and the artist wholeheartedly embraces his constructive affliction of horror vacui.
Veca was born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1963 and grew up in the bedroom community of Livermore California. The suburb is 40 miles east of San Francisco, the epicenter of the Summer of Love, and a hotbed of underground comics during the late sixties and seventies. Publications like Zap!, Slow Death Funnies, and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers were being published out of the Bay Area and made their way into the hands of teenagers and young adults across America along with Mad Magazine out of New York. Comic books (under or above ground), newspaper comics, animated cartoons, feature films, and advertising have long inspired young people to seek out the visual arts, and Veca was no exception. He was compelled to draw and at an early age knew he wanted to be an artist.
