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Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, Ansis Puriņš
This exhibition features the landscape as it relates to the work of three notable New England comics-makers, Marek Bennett, Greg Cook, and Ansis Puriņš. Marek and Greg, in addition to their comics work, have assiduous landscape-drawing practices. Ansis has built a world around an enchanted forest. Connecting them is the employment of landscape as a setting, a metaphor, and an invitation to explore. Please take that last item to heart, and enter into what these artists have provided by way of their observations and imaginations.
New Hampshire-based cartoonist, musician, and educator Marek Bennett leads discovery-based Comics Workshops for all ages throughout New England and the world beyond. His comics work includes the graphic novel series, The Civil War Diary of Freeman Colby, as well as drawing, translating, and editing for The Most Costly Journey (2021) with the bilingual El Viaje Project. In September 2022, both books were featured at the National Book Festival in Washington DC. Marek is the recipient of the New Hampshire Governor’s Arts Award for Art Education.
Greg Cook’s subjects range from history to comedy to fictional dramas about day-to-day life. He has published his comics in Nickelodeon Magazine, Tower Records' Pulse magazine, The Believer, New Art Examiner, and numerous other publications. His Catch As Catch Can was published by Highwater Books in 2001 and helped him win the "Promising New Talent" award at the Small Press (Comics) Expo in Bethesda, MD, the following year. His art has been exhibited in venues near Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he resided for a decade, as well as as Chicago, Cleveland, Napoli, Italy, and Angouleme, France. His work toured the United States as part of the exhibit “Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation” in 2003 and 2004. Cook wrote art criticism for the Boston Phoenix for over a decade and continues art coverage at his project Wonderland. His most recent graphic novel is Friends Is Friends (First Second, 2016). He lives in Malden, Massachusetts.
Ansis Puriņš is a freelance illustrator and cartoonist based in Allston, MA. When he’s not drawing his latest graphic novel, he’s making comics for Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine and working on various projects for clients. His work can be found in Boston-area comic book stores as well as on two electrical boxes for the City of Boston's PaintBox program (both on Comm Ave). He has won grants from the Xeric Foundation as well as the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo (M.I.C.E.) for his work. He was recently interviewed on Australia's national public radio (ABC), by beloved host Angela Catterns about his upcoming Bunyip comic (ask him about Bunyips).