Mark Tansey (b. 1949) is a meticulous artist whose training extends back to his childhood in San Jose, California. Both his parents had careers suffused in the visual arts. His father—Richard G. Tansey—was an art historian, and his mother—Luraine Tansey—was a slide librarian at UC-Santa Cruz. Along with Wendell Simons, she developed the first Universal Slide Classification System in 1969. The Tanseys were involved in editing five editions of Gardner's Art Through the Ages. So, growing up, Mark and his brothers were exposed not only to art and art history, but discussions on systems of categorization and deliberations over visual subject matter. In 1969, Tansey began studying at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. Five years later, he moved to New York for graduate studies at Hunter College. In addition to his studies, he worked briefly as an assistant to Helen Frankenthaler, who was redefining painting by exploring large abstract forms after having promulgated the art of stain-painting.

Tansey is one of those rare sought-after artists whose work is difficult to find on the market because he is not a prolific painter. Rather, he first spends significant time conceptualizing a subject. He then works for up to two years on each painting, producing sketches, collages, and studies before commencing. According to Phoebe Hoban, Tansey is “the master of mordant polemical paintings about modernist art theory and deconstructionism, a painter who makes paintings about the idea of making paintings” (Phoebe Hoban, “The Wheel Turns: Painting Paintings About Painting,” New York Times, April 27, 1997: Section 2, Page 35). In 2004, Tansey began using ultramarine blue as his principal hue. To achieve the widest range of tonalities in what have been described as his monochromatic paintings, Tansey, unlike most painters today, has adopted a subtractive painting process that is akin to the technique behind fresco-painting, albeit in reverse. Both techniques require artists to work efficiently before the plaster or paint dries and can no longer be effective. Tansey nevertheless is able to suggest polychrome because of how effectively he present nuances of a single color.

Unlike the French artist Yves Klein, who sought and trademarked a deep saturated ultramarine blue (now known as Klein blue), Tansey excels at creating volume (solids and voids) by virtue of the way in which he adds and subtracts paint to the surface of his canvases. This approach allows Tansey to unleash a composition in much the same way Michelangelo carved marble to release the figure within a block of stone.

A conceptual artist, Tansey paints landscapes that are simultaneously ironic, magical, and surreal. As the title of his 1994 exhibition at the Denver Art Museum (which traveled to the Columbus Art Museum in Ohio) suggests, we are dealing with Landscape as Metaphor. By limiting his palette to one color and the hues of that color when mixed with white, Tansey leaves the real world for a fantasy, for a construction.

– Annemarie Sawkins, PhD