Mark Cross Growing up in Auckland, NewZealand, Mark Cross has developed a reputation as one of the South Pacific’s leading contemporary realist painters. Married to Polynesian master weaver, Ahitautama Makaea the couple have for many years divided their time between studios in Niue Island and New Zealand while travelling and exhibiting elsewhere in the world. His paintings over time have emerged from the artist's extended immersion in a small, isolated, water-bound, natural environment into a universal vision that questions the foibles of Mankind. Elements of the New Zealand and Niue environment became the atmospheric stages for these allegorical communications although more recently he has employed similarly unique landscapes from around the world. In their ethereal, visionary way, the works warn of the dire ecological imperatives that face both a small island and a planet. Deviating from his painting, Mark has for many years experimented with photography, assemblage sculpture, installation and video. The artist has achieved through all his work a uniqueness that avoids the trappings of provincialism, so often associated with realism, and replaces it with an acutely perceptive, universal worldview.