How Mark English is Painting the City of Knoxville
By Susan Alexander I Photograph by Molly Herb
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 41, Issue 6 (Nov/Dec 2025)
Mark Carson English (he uses his middle name so as not to be confused with artist Mark English) pats the neck of the 8-foot-tall wooden giraffe he has coated in rainbow-colored dribbles and drips of acrylic paints. “It’s my self portrait,” he says. “I do one every year.”
The resemblance is striking. Though not 8 feet, English is tall (6’6”) and lean, and his black T-shirt and shorts are nearly as paint-spattered as the giraffe.
The whole of English’s Old City studio is stacked with colorful canvases in a variety of colors, sizes and styles. Most are his own, but some are by other artists he admires. “Not a day goes by I don’t learn something from somebody else,” he says. English spends about a week each month in Knoxville. He travels frequently to New York and Nashville and Miami, and he has a studio in Jacksonville. A self-taught artist, he says,
“I notice things. I look. I learn. And I’ve had some great influence from artists I’ve watched or painted with.”
English grew up in Knoxville and first had his art in a show at Farragut High School. Since then, he’s participated in about 1,000 shows, he says, and has painted more than 15,000 pieces. Many are created with a customer’s specific desires in mind, influenced by the design of its destination, whether a living room or a corporate lobby. His pieces decorate the walls of downtown restaurants Kefi, Fiori and Vida and the rooftop bar at the Hyatt Place hotel.
He paints in a variety of media and also creates textural pieces using fabric and decoupage. He sculpts. He uses canvas, paper, wood and metal. He’s painted purses and used bits of Playboy magazines in large collages for Fashion Week in New York.
He describes his art as expressive and soulful and says he’s known as both an abstract expressionist and as a street artist. “What’s important is the intimacy of the client’s relationship with the painting. Art is such a personal thing. People see it every day and then possibly pass it down to their children.”
You can find English on Instagram @markcarsonenglish.
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