As a child I began computer programming and this world was my life for many decades, I fell out of this and fell in love with oil painting in my 30s; I’ve been a full time freelance artist ever since. I love painting partly because it is not computing, because it’s organic, solid, can’t be sequenced or automated, because it is a raw form of expression. I love oil paint above all media because of the natural beauty of the paint, and the flexibility and immense subtlety of the medium; any of a million possibilities and visual effects can be achieved. I also love oil painting because it is difficult. I must push always beyond my abilities; each painting is an experiment and a lesson.

I paint in thin layers of paint and aim for a smooth finish. I typically use three; a coloured ground/imprimatura, an opaque ‘underpainting’, which uses Earth colours and a high level of detail in itself, then a glaze layer (or several) in increasingly transparent and more vibrant hues. I use tiny amounts of amber in walnut oil in my glazing medium, and usually paint on solid surfaces.

In subjects, I paint ideas and feelings. From the outset of my painting my art was described as surrealist, a term which conveys a certain type of strange and eccentric image. For that reason of simple description, I don’t mind my work being described as surrealist, but I don’t adhere to, or care about the principles of that 1930s group. For me, I’m trying to represent a wide gamut of feeling and idea. If any artist, it’s Beethoven’s piano sonatas which are my inspiration.

Mark Sheeky (b. 1972) is a multi-disciplinary artist and polymath from the North of England. His career began developing computer games, publishing over 50 titles by 2006. In 2008 he became a full time artist, an oil painter in the surrealist/fantastical genre, and has one painting in the U.K. National Art Collection. 

His output as of 2024 includes over 1000 oil paintings, sculptures and other artworks. In music, Sheeky has recorded and produced 39 original albums of instrumental music or pop/rock, 4 with Deborah Edgeley as part of contemporary lieder group 'Fall in Green'. His first novella ‘The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death’, a literary fantasy in the style of Jorge Luis Borges, was published by Pentangel Books in 2015. Non-fiction includes ‘21st Century Surrealism’, and the practical computer book ‘How To Organise Your Computer Files’.