Mark English

Mark English (1933–2019) was an American illustrator and painter, born on September 19, 1933, in Hubbard, Texas. His first job was picking cotton; in his own words, he got out of the cotton fields “by learning to paint signs.” After Army service during the Korean War he graduated with honors from Art Center in 1960 and went to work on automobile advertising in Detroit.

In 1964 he moved his family to Connecticut. After a lean first year of experimenting there, he said, one of his Little Women illustrations for Reader’s Digest won an award in the Society of Illustrators’ annual exhibition: “After that I got into magazines.” His work ran in The Saturday Evening Post, Time, Sports Illustrated, Redbook and The Ladies’ Home Journal, and he designed postage stamps for the U.S. Postal Service. In 1967 the Artists Guild of New York named him Artist of the Year. The Society of Illustrators elected him to its Hall of Fame in 1983; he recalled a letter from the Society stating that he had received more awards in its annual exhibitions than any other illustrator.

In 1976 he and Bob Peak, Bernie Fuchs, Alan E. Cober, Bob Heindel and Fred Otnes formed the Illustrators Workshop. In 1977 Hallmark Cards brought him to Kansas City to teach its creative staff for a year. He stayed, and in 1995 he and his son John started the Illustration Academy in Kansas City.

He retired from illustration in the early 1990s to paint. “As a painter, I paint for myself,” he said. “As an illustrator, I am solving someone else's problems.” Sager Reeves Gallery describes his latest work as landscapes and figures made into “abstracted compositions of color and texture,” each layered with paint, ink and collage. Between 2001 and 2010 he had six one-man exhibitions at Eleanor Ettinger Gallery in New York, and the last exhibition on his own list is a group show at Sager Braudis Gallery in Columbia, Missouri, in May 2019. He died in Kansas City on August 8, 2019. In 2025 Sager Reeves Gallery showed three of his paintings in its Masters Exhibit.