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Mark Mittlesteadt grew up around art with his mother, Faye Mittlesteadt, a professional artist. Mark began his career in the arts as a professional musician traveling around the country. After Mark returned back to his hometown and joined a local band, he began his career as a painter. He has been a professional artist since 1984 when he opened his "Wildlife Art Studio" painting portraits of his favorite subjects, wildlife, and also doing many pet portraits. After many years of life on the road as a musician and artist doing the art show circuit, he began doing more commercial work and concentrated on commissioned work only. |
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Artist Mark Mittlesteadt at work in his studio. |
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Mark's career took off when he began entering Waterfowl Stamp competitions. He placed in the top ten consistently in Duck, Pheasant, Turkey and Trout stamp contests and his wildlife paintings became more popular with the release of his NewWood Eagle limited edition prints. After many years of devoting his life's work to painting wildlife, it was apparent that the market was becoming saturated with wildlife prints and the idea of painting the same popular scenes over and over again was becoming less appealing. Mark turned his attention to portrait work. While still maintaining an interest in wildlife, he began incorporating portraiture and wildlife together. |
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With Mark's love of the outdoors and wildlife never waning, his portrait work led him to meeting Marge Gibson, Director of REGI (Raptor Education Group, Inc.) of Antigo, WI. His portrait of Marge still stands as an example of some of his finest work. Becoming a supporter of REGI and the work they do, led to Mark creating a mural for REGI's van which became a moving billboard for the group. Always feeling like his work was never large enough to suit the work he loved doing, devoting himself to mural work al-lowed him the scale and size with which to carry his ideas out. |
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After years of creating smaller scale dioramas for exotic pet habitats, it was only natural that his work carry over into creating full scale museum quality murals and dioramas. In the summer of 2007, Mark was commissioned by Leanne Meyer, another muralist, and the Safari Room taxidermy studio to work on a large private museum in Montana. This museum was a large scale project with one end of the museum depicting North American wildlife in their natural habitat and the other displaying African wildlife. It was this work that led to the creation of 2nd Nature Creations as an art studio that creates murals and dioramas for private residences, businesses and museums. Mark has devoted many years of his life to art, but more importantly his main desire is to inspire others in the way that nature inspires him. |
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