Born in Milford, Delaware on 4 April 1976, John-Mark Gleadow is an accomplished young artist renowned for his hyper-realistic oil paintings. After the fourth grade Gleadow put his formal art training on hold for years, attending the University of Delaware to study mechanical engineering. It was while in college that he realized he was being held back by the technical restraints of engineering and switched his major, eventually earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1999.

Gleadow’s style has developed and advanced over the years, although cites Rene Magritte, Salvador Dali, and Johannes Vermeer as among his greatest influences: “I fell in love with the beauty of their imagery and have always been in awe of their amazing gift for depicting reality, or their version of it.” It is this mixture of technical proficiency and imagination that he presents in his own work. Gleadow explains that this is satisfying in a way that photorealism cannot be – through this combination of skill and creativity that he can present even invisible truths to the viewer. The vibrant colors he uses are often noticed by art enthusiasts, and interesting fact considering that the artist copes with colorblindness. His intricate “Bibliotheque” series has been especially well-received since, as he explains, “the wonderful thing about working in this vein is how limitless the subject matter can be and how it makes for a logical way of juxtaposing entirely different topics, producing a work of art that’s beautiful as a whole, not just aesthetically, but thematically as well.”

Obviously a rising talent, Gleadow had gallery representation by the time he graduated from college. He has since earned numerous awards, grants, and exhibitions in New Mexico, New York, Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. He has earned the 2002 Emerging Artists’ Grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, in addition to a $15,000 fellowship in 2005 from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Gleadow’s work can be found in private and corporate collections in the United States, Europe, and around the world.