Mark Carroll was born in Buffalo, NY, in 1950 and grew up in a home filled with artistic activity. His father, Richard, a full-time sculptor and master carver in wood and stone, created granite monuments and religious figures for churches. His mother, Mary, a landscape and portrait painter, worked primarily in oils.
He attended East Aurora High School, East Aurora, NY, majoring in Art. In 1973, he received a Bachelors Degree in Liberal Arts, Art, from Buffalo State College, and in 1979, completed the NYS Teaching Certification K-12. He was awarded a Master’s Degree in Art Education in 1988. Mark taught high school art at East Aurora High School, Iroquois High School in Elma, NY, and Lafayette High School in Lafayette, NY.
The experiences that most profoundly influenced his philosophy of life and approach to art were two long-distance hikes on the Appalachian Trail. In 1977 and again in 1986, he walked the entire wilderness trail from Georgia to Maine, a distance of 2,145 miles. The intense experience of walking and living in the natural beauty of forests and mountains for five months at a time left a deep impression.
Mark began his professional art career as a woodcarver, crafting such items as duck decoys and caricature figures. He soon progressed to extremely detailed decorative bird carvings and expressive human characters.
After his father died, Mark was asked if he could continue the carving of the large religious statues. For several years he worked full-time sculpting life-size figures for churches.
His interest in nature led to commissions from Buffalo Science Museum. Working with measurements from plaster casts of fossil remains, he carved an archaeopteryx, the first known bird, with its wings extended in flight. He also crafted, in wood and metal, a 30x enlargement of a western conifer seed bug for the entomology department from detailed drawings he made with a microscope. For the museum’s Discovery Room, he carved a baby mastodon from a cherry log for children to climb.
For the past 25 years Mark has been a self-employed free lance sculptor working out of his studio in East Aurora, NY. He specialized as a sculptor/model-maker in the toy industry for companies such as Fisher-Price, Toys-R-Us, and Kid Design. He has also exhibited in many art shows and galleries and has won numerous awards.
Mark moved to Arizona in January of 2009 and established a studio in the rustic town of Cave Creek.
The early experience of making a wide variety of complex, detailed wildlife and figure carvings, then later the discipline of exacting, industrial model-making honed his craftsmanship and eye for detail. This training provided the necessary technical expertise when he turned to developing a vocabulary of personal form.
Evolving from the realistic to the abstract, his sculpture, inspired by the human figure and the organic shapes of nature, makes an uplifting affirmation of the spirit.

View Mark's web site at www.thesculpturestudio.com.

Portfolio: