Born and raised in Quezon City, Mark Lester was a light-hearted and joyful kid as he studied painting. There's a ferocious intensity that lurks in his work owed only in part to his impassioned subjects--inspired by the big names of the Baroque era.

Piousness, pleasure, fury, and death--the kind that gets your hands dirty. His paintings hold unsparing realness, well-suited from the time and manner in which he lives. There's a word in Italian: "sottobosco," which means "undergrowth." It also refers to an art subgenre of still life depicting the plants, fungi, and creepy crawlies that inhabit the forest floor--the life that thrives in darkness. He is not a painter of sottobosco, but in a way, he embodies its sentiment: to pursue what lies beneath.

He does likewise thrive in darkness, though. When he was young, he was prowling in the streets, accompanied by his unsavory associates, itching for a back alley brawl.

He was a personal trainer for a fitness company. He recalled, "It's hard to separate the Lester, the fitness trainer, from Lester, the painter. One could not exist without the other." He has lost my job since the pandemic. So he went back to his passion, knocking on your door for an opportunity to be a well-known artist he's been dreaming about since he was a kid.