by Cynthia Ozick

Mark Podwal started out with ingeniously witty black-and-white line drawings. These were never austere (as "black-and-white" may suggest), but when he later augmented this aspect of his art with color, a certain tenderness (never a merely sentimental softness) began to glow, like translucent haloes, from his images. What strikes me as the most salient element of Mark's work is his startling capacity to catch a complex concept visually. This isn't a simple one-on-one connection, or conveyance, between an idea and a picture meant to symbolize that idea. Mark's unique power is to cause an image to be inhabited by its concept; or you could put it the other way around: that his idea begins to grow physical limbs and shapes, so that the meaning transcends one's ability to express it.

For instance: Mark's Eastern European Jewish villages, poor and suffering and sadly askew, will often send out upward-streaming letters of the Hebrew alphabet, letters that dance joyfully over the page, so that we know, and feel, the hopeful prayers of a people. You can't translate, or in any way fully transmit, this vision into a phrase or two: it is the equivalent of a poem, which is deeper and vaster than the words of which it is made. Mark's art expresses the inexpressible; it captures not only thought but the tone of thought. I hesitate to call this gift "spiritual," an abused and amorphous term, especially because Mark's work is not only inward but outward, into the real and concrete thinginess of the world. He seizes both the neighborhood and the stars, as in his JERUSALEM SKY book, and both are equally tactile.