Mark Wheeler
Mark is a retired industrial/product designer based in Saco, ME. Trained as a traditional furniture designer and maker in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the late 1970s, he relocated to Massachusetts in 1981 and spent the next 45 years applying his creativity across commercial millwork, institutional furniture, boat building, military tactical communications, electro-mechanical consumer products, and medical diagnostic equipment. His career has yielded multiple US. utility and design patents, and he continues to consult for Rikon Tools, an international woodworking equipment manufacturer.
From infancy until his early teens he was raised in multiple locations across Africa. Mark’s sensibility for craft, pattern, form and function was shaped while young by exposure to diverse indigenous cultures. Extensive travel for work and leisure further expands his appreciation for natural and architectural forms, patterns and their cultural expressions.
Woodworking has been a lifelong passion—sparked in the DC area high school shop, pursued through college, and expressed in furniture, bird carving and caricature carving. In 2015 he discovered woodturning and developed his process: sourcing locally grown Maine green wood from already downed trees, turning the initial form, air-drying for nine months to a year, then refining with final turning, edge and rotary carving, pyrography for texture, and selective dyes or paints to realize the vision for each unique piece.
Mark served in the Army National Guard beginning in 1978 as a forward observer for heavy artillery and, after transferring to the Massachusetts Guard in 1981, earned the “Old Reliable” Arctic Expert Badge and served as a winter survival trainer through 1988. He left as the rank of Staff Sergeant.
He moved to Saco in 2019 with his wife Patty and their Black Lab, Ivy. Being a frequent visitor to a family camp in the Belgrade Lakes region since 2008 secured his love of Maine. He exhibits regularly at Maine craft shows and galleries, continues to make work in his shop, and spends retirement traveling as well as visiting his five children and growing circle of grandchildren.
You can see more of Mark's work on his Instagram page.
