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: “In my paintings, I channel my inner world and I explore and examine my relationship with the people, places and things around me. I have a deep and abiding love and respect for art history, particularly cubism and fauvism and I often depict narratives of love, reflections on solitude, childhood memories and my work is abound with historical cameos and references. I’d say the main protagonists are individuals, places and, even, objects, that are imbued with an enigmatic sense of self reflection. Being a Quebecker, I have been influenced by and one can see echoes of the great Quebec painters Alfred Pellan, Paul-Vanier Beaulieu and Jean Dallaire. More than mere references to their work however, my paintings are reflections of my own life, fuel for the human soul and they arrive only after much reworking, changing, adding and subtracting. Brushes, hands and palette knives are the tools employed in the service of colours in my attempt to energize my paintings surface and to give it a sense of vitality, a sense of “aliveness”. A close friend of mine has said that my work seems to be a manifestation of my inner identity, of my true self. “That’s sounds likely”, I’ve replied. “because when I’ve finished a painting, it often seems to me a stranger that I feel I’ve previously met. That magical, transcendent feeling of déjà-vu”.