Strodl  like Yodel

Love doesn’t care. 

Love is powerful, it stands up too bullies and ill contents:

Love is sweet, never boastful. Love is kind and bold, caring and wonderful. It gives, nurtures, protects, and carries itself forward from generation to generation. It does not ask who belongs. It does not build territories.

Do not ask me to whisper the word. It was never born for whispering. I want to scream it into the world.

Why are we so ashamed to admit it? Why this macho pride that pretends feeling is weakness, while we pound our chests and destroy ourselves like fools on a rock?

Love belongs everywhere: in children shouting into the air, in the cracked hands of carpenters building tomorrow, in muddy boots feeding us, in fishermen leaving for the sun, in the eyes of young lovers who forgot how to count, and in the gratitude of the old for one more morning.

Love is older than every nation, border, flag, and wall. It understands the need for a home, a door, a private room, a garden—but it refuses to believe walls are more important than windows.

Hatred arrives in uniforms, waving banners, making lists and naming enemies. Love needs no uniform. It simply recognizes a human being.

Love says yes. I have one short life. I would rather spend it astonished.

Mark Strodl is a multidisciplinary activist artist whose work spans mural watercolors, digital surrealism, and video storytelling—each medium rooted in themes of redemption, truth, freedom, and human resilience. A graduate of the School of Visual Arts, Strodl’s creative path began in the worlds of illustration, photography, and large-scale commercial production. After years in commercial media, Strodl redirected his life toward fine art and social activism, transforming personal hardship into creative purpose. Living with ADHD and dyslexia, and now over 30 years in recovery from addiction, he has built a body of work centered on compassion, memory, justice, and the overlooked human spirit. His paintings and animations have appeared in more than nine solo exhibitions and numerous group shows throughout New York and beyond.

12 Freedoms Of Democracy

Is an exhibition about giving physical form to the reminder in what we have seemed to have forgotten: things that we blindly accept that lose their meaning, and become invisible.

Each monumental watercolor explores an idea that cannot be seen: the freedom to dream, the freedom to be wrong, freedom from fear, freedom from surveillance, equality, conscience, memory, and the courage to question. 

Surrealism has always fascinated me because it says what we were thinking all along, yet forgot to ask. I do not paint things. I paint the invisible forces beneath them. My subjects are not people but the archetypes that shape human civilization: freedom, fear, memory, imagination, doubt, conscience, and power. Every painting asks the same question:

Mark Strodl is a multidisciplinary activist artist whose work spans mural watercolors, digital surrealism, and video storytelling—each medium rooted in themes of redemption, truth, freedom, and human resilience.  A Fellow of the Château d'Orquevaux.