About the artist

Mark Pinto is an Indiana native whose creative journey has been shaped by both discipline and discovery. He began his education at a technology school before transferring to the Herron School of Art & Design, where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts. Throughout his studies, Mark supported himself by working in graphic design—an early indication of the seamless transition that would follow graduation.

For more than 25 years, Mark has worked professionally in the field of graphic design, building a career that spanned photo manipulation, illustration for publishing companies, and design work for manufacturing. While the work was varied and technically demanding, it never fully satisfied the internal aesthetic pull toward fine art—the desire to create work driven not by expectation, but by personal vision.

That desire led Mark back to one of his earliest artistic fascinations: pointillism. Drawn to the method since high school, he sought to revisit it in a way that felt both personal and original—something not overused or derivative. The question became not what to create, but how to make a mark that could belong to no one else.

The answer was literal.

By abandoning traditional tools and using only his own fingerprints, Mark reimagined pointillism through identity itself. From this exploration, Pintollism was born. Each artwork is created entirely by hand, layering thousands of individual fingerprint impressions to build form, depth, and color. There is no blending on the surface—no brushes, no pencils, no paint. Instead, permanent archival ink is applied impression by impression, allowing the viewer’s eye to do the blending, unifying countless marks into a single image.

Every piece is directly touched by the artist, made using nothing more than the fingers of his left hand—tools he believes were given to him with purpose. In Pintollism, the process becomes inseparable from the artist himself, resulting in one-of-a-kind works where identity, intention, and creation leave a permanent mark.