MARK CARSON ENGLISH HAS MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES.

They show themselves in the colors he uses, the brushstrokes and paint splotches, in the materials that find their way into his paintings, in the subject matter he chooses, in the mood that he emotes. As an abstract painter, he isn’t limited to the confines and rules of reality—instead, he paints what he feels, the things he sees with more than his eyes.

The roots of English’s art career started in childhood, when his parents introduced him to the work of an artist named Adamo. “My parents collected his work, and when he came up to deliver them, he hung out for the weekend and painted,” says English. “He was great—big hair, big mustache, very 1970s. He called me ‘Little Marco,’ and I just thought he was so cool. I fell in love with art then—but being in Tennessee, in a conservative environment, artists were not really accepted. Art wasn’t even something that my family really encouraged me to pursue, but I was good at it.”

He was also drawn to chemistry and spent a great deal of time with his chemistry set, mixing and creating things—“things that caught on fire or blew up—I found it all really fascinating,” he recalls.

Diverse as his interests were, it was his love of beautiful things and creating those beautiful things that won out in the end. “I was good at creative things—I liked to dance; I loved music and theater. I was a complete nerd,” English says with no hint of irony.

Nerd or not, English had a talent that needed direction, and he found it under the tutelage of such artists as LeRoy Neiman, Murat Kaboulov and Igor Raikhline. “They were big influences on me, and I would also read and look at photos and books of artists and their work,” he says. “I would try to figure out how they did it and if I could do something like that, because the schools I went to didn’t really have a great art program.”

Everything that English learned from the artists he studied under, coupled with his innate skills and the techniques he taught himself, gave him a quality of work that people were drawn to, and he sold his first painting in high school.

It took years for English’s high school passion to become more than a dalliance, but the now 59-year-old painter has built a name for himself in the Atlanta art world and beyond, with a portfolio of more than 15,000 pieces. “I may have forgotten a few of them along the way,” he says jokingly, though his prolific painting makes the statement more than believable.

And while he may also paint the occasional piece using the techniques of realism and impressionism, English has already found his niche in the world of abstraction. “I can paint more realistic pieces, but why?” he says. “I might as well take a photograph. Painters in that school have incredible talent—but they spend a lifetime to perfect that one little brushstroke to create that one little crease on the right index finger. But at the end of the day, people don’t look at it and say, ‘Oh my God, he spent a month on that finger.’ It just isn’t something that people see—regardless of the amount of talent that it takes to execute that level of perfection.”

And so, rather than perfecting each brushstroke, English would rather paint people and things his way. “I want to paint them the way I see and feel them, not necessarily the way they look,” he contends. “I’ve leaned a lot more toward creating pieces that are emotionally driven and intriguing to the viewer. Pieces that make you think. It’s the way you paint something that resonates with people most. Take a flower, for instance. You can paint the same white tulips different ways. You can paint them in a way that seems kind of depressing. You can paint them in a way that expresses joy, in a way that leaves someone inspired. Even in a way that makes someone just stop and consider. It’s all in the technique, the compositional perspective and the way that you create it to be able to tell the story—they’re still the same white flowers. And a lot of that has to do with the artist’s mind, soul and hand, as well as the way they create it. And, you know—margaritas and some good music always help! Some of my best paintings were created under the influence of good music and margaritas.”

English’s many personalities will be on show next summer in New York, a three-part show that exhibits the “three distinct personality styles” of what he enjoys painting. After more than 15,000 paintings, there is clearly a great deal from which English draws his inspiration. “I use everything I can, everything that interests me,” he says. “You’ll see all kinds of materials and techniques in my work—everything from collage to pop art to graffiti. Right now, I’m using diamond dust in my skull paintings. I use enamel paint, acrylic paint. I even use house paint. I use it all. I don’t discriminate.”

True to his unique perspective, English started a series of self-portraits and has, for the last 12 years, created his very own take on them. “Sometimes I’ll paint them; sometimes I’ll do a metaphoric reference to something. I just think they’re fun, and it’s something unique and different. They’re reflective of different aspects of my personality. This year, I have a nine-and-a-half-foot-tall, 350-pound hand-carved wood giraffe that I’ve painted as my self-portrait,” he says, his voice filled with an expectancy that comes with waiting to deliver the punch line. English’s joke: “People call me Melman, like the hypochondriac giraffe from the movie Madagascar. And yes, I’ll admit that I can be something of a hypochondriac.”

English’s recent body of work has included a comic book-inspired superhero series that he’s currently working on, as well as a collection of vintage Louis Vuitton and Chanel purses. “When I was a kid, I thought I was Spider-Man, so I love old comic books,” he says. “For my superhero series, I’ve collaged canvases and am doing very detailed street art on these canvases as part of the comic book scene. It’s kind of a throwback to my childhood. But the purses are inspired by something different. Art follows fashion, and fashion follows art—they’ve always been intertwined, and I find that kind of fascinating. I paint the designs of the vintage purses I like, throw a skull on them with some diamond dust to add sparkle, and graffiti my mark on it.”

With a career defined by boundless experimentation, humor and fearless reinvention, English proves that art is never just one thing. It is personality, emotion and memory layered on canvas—sometimes with a little diamond dust sprinkled in. However his many creative selves appear, they leave behind a body of work that is as unpredictable as it is unmistakably his.” *

Liesel Schmidt lives in Navarre, Florida, and works as a freelance writer for local and regional magazines. She is also a web content writer and book editor. Follow her on X at @laswrites or download her novels, Coming Home to You, The Secret of Us and Life Without You, at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com.