Born in Montreal in 1960, John Marok is a nationally and internationally recognized artist. A graduate of john Abbott College and Concordia University, where he specialized in painting and fine arts, he is also a recipient of the Queen's Jubilee Medal, as well as grants from the Canada Council and Quebec's ministère de la Culture. His wide-ranging experience of the art world includes research residencies in Europe and Canada. His work has been exhibited in New York and Paris, and has been collected by several museums across Canada, including le Musée du Québec, Toronto's Museum of Contemporary Art and Calgary's Nickel Arts Museum. His paintings hang in private collections, as well as in the collections of the University of Ottawa, the University of Quebec, McGill university, the City of Ottawa and the City of Gatineau. For the past 25 years, john Marok has lived and worked in Wakefield, Quebec, a quaint little village in the Gatineau Hills, where he paints full-time. Of his art, John says: ?My paintings are inspired, influenced and shaped through my experience of places, people and things in my life. I work with the belief that what is most personal is also most universal. My perception is that our vulnerability, our deepest innermost thoughts and feelings of the world around us, can be common and shared.?