Mark Ulriksen (born 1957), is an award winning American painter and magazine illustrator.

After studying at California State University, Chico and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Ulriksen’s first major position was as art director of San Francisco Magazine (formerly San Francisco Focus magazine) from until 1993, when he began to devote all his time and attention to painting and illustrating.

Ulriksen’s first significant illustration assignments came in 1993 from The New Yorker, at the time under the helm of editor Tina Brown, a relationship with has continued to this day. His contributions made history for the magazine with the first cover illustrating the content of the issue (the White House under then-President Clinton, which was also the first issue to include, in the article, further small pictures illustrating the content of the article. Since then he has been a regular contributor to the magazine, and has been responsible for numerous cover images. In addition, he has (on multiple occasions) been paired with the noted baseball writer Roger Angell to illustrate the New Yorker’s annual baseball season wrap.

Ulriksen has also contributed to Rolling Stone Magazine, Vibe Magazine, GQ Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Time Magazine, and Newsweek, and his work features in the permanent collection of The Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (the Museum of Contemporary Art).

Ulriksen’s style incorporates his loves of dogs and baseball, as well as drawing on his family and friends (in a manner akin to Norman Rockwell) to serve as anonymous subjects for his illustrations. It is a style that is expressionistic, quirky, angular, and painterly, with exaggerated features (usually very small hands and feet), but which captures the essence of his subjects dead-on with sweetness, light humor, and joy.

(Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Ulriksen)