Mark Verdoes was born in 1960 in The Hague/Holland. Since his early years he has been a creative person expressing it in ways like music and drawing. After studying at the Photo Academy in the early eighties, he started working for different magazines like AvantGarde, Esquire etc. In 1990 he joined the photo agency Hollandse- Hoogte in Amsterdam. Ten years ago, hungry for new ways to express himself he started painting and sculpture. He took up a study at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. After a few years he had completely stopped working with a camera and devoted his life to the Fine Arts. Photography was always in his heart though, slumbering beneath the surface. VISUAL POETRY Home is where the heart is. This is what he found out when picking up the camera a few years ago. He feels like a fish in the water... But something interesting happened; the years in the studio, struggling with paint, form and composition changed his attitude towards photography. Now he treats the medium as art in the same way he did when making a series of paintings. Playing with reality he feels free to change colours, lightning etc. The final work is printed on thick fine art paper using pigment ink giving it a beautiful gouache-like appearance. He also produces mixed media works where photographic elements are combined with other materials All this results in autonomous images that exceeds traditional photography; images he likes to refer to as visual poetry.