This is from an article Lefty Kreh wrote about my artwork in 1990 for his Outdoors column in The Baltimore Sun Newspaper:

Mark Susinno puts the finishing touches on a musky painting. He has been turning out paintings of fish since 1984.

OLNEY MAN'S PAINTINGS BRING FISH SCENES TO LIFE

OLNEY - Few people now know the name, but that likely will change as a young Maryland artist, Mark Susinno, continues his new work. He is producing some of the best fish paintings I've seen. He is producing some of the best fish paintings I've seen. Susinno comes by his artistic talents naturally. His mother, Marie, painted for pleasure for years and now designs and makes jewelry. "I have always liked drawing," Susinno said. "I was fooling around with pencils and crayons when was in kindergarten, and, by the fourth grade, I had started trying oils. A little later in school, there were Scholastic. Art Award competitions and I always entered. I usually won something each year." . He sold his first painting, a portrait of a beautiful house he admired, while in high school. He sold a few more such paintings, and after high school, enrolled in a prestigious art school, Pratt Institute of Brooklyn, N.Y. Susinno spent four years there and graduated with the highest honors in 1979. He lived three more years in the Brooklyn area, moving back to his native Maryland in 1982 and taking a job building bullet-proof doors. Susinno had not spent much time outdoors, but his brother; Byron, loved fIy fishing and encouraged him to try it. It was an instant love for Mark, who really took to fishing. In 1984, his brother asked him to do a brown trout painting for him. It turned out so well that Mark became interested in painting again. During the next two years, he did a number of paintings, mainly using acrylics, his favorite medium. Susinno began to enter state-sponsored art contests and won six of them in three years. In 1986, he won the Maryland Trout Stamp competition, and in 1988 and 1989, the Indiana Trout Stamp competition. He won the 1989 Kentucky and Delaware Trout Stamp contests, and his painting will grace the 1989 Chesapeake Bay Sportfishing Stamp. In addition, Susinno has sold a number of cover paintings to national and regional magazines. Several times he also has entered the National Duck Stamp contest, conducted by the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service and has been in the top 25. That is a great honor, considering several thousand of the nation’s elite artists compete in the contest. Wild Wings, a national chain of art galleries, carries some of his paintings, and he is working on two muskellunge paintings, which he will submit for the firm's approval. A muskellunge, which resembles a pike, is the largest freshwater game fish in North America and is found in the Upper Midwest and central Canada. Working out of a bright room in a lovely home near Olney, with a sweeping view of the woods behind him, Susinno is creating some beautiful paintings. He said he gets his ideas "mainly from my fishing experience." He enjoys fishing the Potomac River for smallmouths, and Big Hunting Creek for trout. Susinno said he has no favorite painting that he has done. It takes him 75 to 150 hours to do one. "By the time I'm finished, I'm ready to leave it and move to something else." he said. He usually works on more than one painting at a time just to keep things interesting, he said. "Tidewater Terror" is the 1989 Chesapeake Bay Sportfishing Stamp painting of a largemouth bass blasting through a school of yellow perch to grab a surface lure. Susinno is offering a limited edition print, each of which is numbered and signed by the artist and comes with a mint 1989 Chesapeake Bay Sportfishing Stamp. He also will color remarque any prints for an additional fee. Mark has a number of other prints of his work available.