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Honor Marks grew up in Charleston, SC and remembers slogging through the marshes of the lowcountry as a child searching for rare wildflowers with her family. Through the years they photographed hundreds of wildflowers all over the South. Today, she continues the journey through her artwork. Drawing her inspiration from writers Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, and Madeleine L'Engle and a host of botanical and natural history painters, Honor "transforms meticulous field study into bold, yet sensitive paintings of some of our most beautiful and rare botanical specimens" (Burton Moore, Audubon Gallery). Her work has been described by Charleston Magazine as "hauntingly luminous" and her use of translucent layers of oil paint has drawn comparisons to Mark Rothko.
Honor double majored in English and Fine Arts receiving her B.A. with honors from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. After moving to Athens, Georgia, she painted for Habersham, a nationally renowned hand painted furniture company. A design position which allowed her to work with the Nature Company, Talbots, and The Plaza Hotel took her back to Charleston. In 1999 after years as a commercial artist, she devoted herself to oil painting full time.
Honor was awarded Best in Show at the 2003 Piccolo Spoleto Juried Outdoor Art Exhibit by juror Kevin Grogan, director of the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Ga. She received the 2005 Griffith Lowcountry Artist Award, and in 2006 an exhibit of her native and endangered species paintings was narrated by Rudy Mancke, host of television's Nature Scene. In 2009 the Medical College of Georgia commissioned Honor to create five paintings of medicinal plants to hang permanently in the new MCG Cancer Center.
About her work, Honor says, "My work is intended to reveal what is right in front of us but goes unseen. The unfurling of a leaf, the structure of a stem, the majesty of a single fading flower are all such amazing and complicated creations. The architecture of the smallest shell is unbelievably sophisticated. As wild places disappear, we are increasingly surrounded by landscapes that are manmade. How will we retain a sense of wonder, awe, mystery, or humility when everything that was created by something greater than us is gone? The natural world is brimming with the sacred; We are steeped in the divine. We truly take for granted the enormity of the miracles that surround us. My work celebrates those miracles."
