Mark Gatewood began painting in the 1980's while collaborating in a Los Angeles based design and manufacture firm.  He utilized many of the concepts and materials developed for his sculptural furniture line to arrive at a prototype frame assembly that he felt would sustain the use of more complex painting mediums and catalyzed finishes.  Gatewood chose to use scrapers, palette knives, rags and sticks to manipulate the vivid color fields and Epoxy Resin textures applied to his convex wooden structures.  Throughout the 1980's his focus was primarily concerned with exploring and refining this line of Acrylics and Resin on Wood paintings.  During the 1990's he began developing a new series of works on flat wooden panels that utilized a different set of tools, concepts, and surface aesthetic.  The Acrylics on Wood paintings have since become some of his strongest and most enduring works.  Currently, Gatewood is broadening his artistic reach once again with his Acrylic Reversal paintings which incorporate text and symbolic themes that are revealed though an inventive method of paint film reversal.