Mark Tansey: Study for Shades of Mount Sainte Victoire
Tansey’s paintings are nearly always monochromatic and therefore have a very close relationship with his drawings. When Tansey does paint however he has a pretty idiosyncratic method. He first primes his canvas with white gesso, then he blocks out the general forms of the composition by covering sections with colour, and then works to carefully remove layers of paint to reveal varying amounts of the white gesso. He only produces about one painting every two years, each one is though composed from the sketches and collages that he produces in order to work out his ideas. Therefore drawing is essential to his thinking, but he approaches drawing, like his painting in a very personal way.
Much of Tansey's artwork concerns his fascination with image making. There are several paradoxes that occur over and over again when making images and Tansey is a very astute worker with the implications of these paradoxes. He is also funny, rarely gives you a belly laugh but he is often humorous and witty.
Secret of the Sphinx: Etching
The idea of the silence of visual art lies at the core of a whole range of issues in relation to art practices. For instance the myth of Pygmalion and what at first seems its total antithesis, the concept of media specificity. In the myth of Pygmalion a sculptor falls in love with his own sculpture. The trope of realism in sculpture and the disappearance of the dividing line between life and art, is a very old idea, one that Gombrich is very taken with in his great study of the psychology of pictorial representation, 'Art and Illusion'. Gombrich in many ways believes that one of art's central themes is the gradual improvement of representational techniques, the logical trajectory of his thinking being of course that at some point the distinction between reality and illusion will disappear. (I do think that some CGI techniques are getting close) This is in many ways the opposite of a 'truth to materials' aesthetic. If we go back to Lessing and his foster child Greenberg, their concerns were to allocate to each medium its specific nature, and in the manipulation of what is "unique to the nature" of a particular medium, an artist would find 'truth', or an authentic 'voice'. A voice of course could never issue from a stone sculpture, but in Pygmalion's case a Goddess intervened and granted his sculpture life. This is a very old idea. In some societies forms of life or spirit can be held in everything, including the landscape itself and the rocks it is composed of. This is animism, the perception that all things; rocks, plants, animals, the weather and even the words that come out of our mouths or the sounds made by waves breaking on the shore, are in some way alive or animated. But what would a landscape say to us, what would the sphinx say? The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, "If a lion could talk, we would not understand it." The sphinx is of course an image that is half human and half lion. So would we half understand it? The Sphinx in legend had a riddle, "What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon and three in the evening?" The answer of course was us humans, trust us to think that what a stone image would be thinking about was the short life of human beings. All of the philosophy and stories surrounding the sphinx are short circuited by Tansey's man with a tape recorder. He crouches at the Sphinx's side, microphone ready and waiting for the Sphinx to break her silence, but what will the Sphinx say? There was a TV play called the Stone Tape, written by Nigel Kneale in 1972, it welded together science and superstition, suggesting that stone walls could resonate with the psychic vibrations of emotionally charged events. The stone in effect carrying messages like a tape. A not too far fetched idea, because recording tape is itself a physical material. The early version of which used metal wire to hold messages. Wire drawn across a receiver after it had been exposed to a varying magnetic field produced by a varying electric current that was itself varied by being linked to sound vibrations, could induce a similarly varying electric current, that recreated the original signal at a reduced level, the vibrations of which could be reconverted back into sound. Perhaps Tansey's human has a special recording device that can 'read' the stone in the same way as Kneale's stone tapes. The stone preserving in some way heightened emotional moments that the Sphinx had over time witnessed. However this image is an etching, a type of recording device whereby the artist covers a metal plate with a flat wax acid resist and draws by scratching through this resist with a stylus, and then uses acid to etch out the exposed metal surfaces. The first sound recording devices typically used a large conical horn to collect and focus the physical air pressure of sound waves produced by the human voice. A sensitive membrane, located at the apex of the cone, was connected to an articulated stylus, and as the changing air pressure moved the diaphragm back and forth, the stylus scratched an analogue of the sound waves onto a moving recording medium, such as a disc coated with a soft material such as wax. The similarity is I feel not accidental and if so, it introduces the possibility that 'the medium is the message', is Tansey's 'real' message.
Judging, 1997 Graphite on paper
Philosophy is always probing the gap between meaning and understanding. In this case there is drawing as a type of action, (the verb) and drawing as a thing, (the noun). But what lies between these two understandings? Can meaning be picked out of an unidentified territory that lies between things and actions? I have just finished a period of assessments here in Leeds at the Arts University. I have been assessing student art work for well over 40 years and Tansey's 'Judging' still makes me smile. The marking schemes, learning outcomes and the associated matrices of numbers, U curves, percentages, levels of achievement and other systems designed to give some sort of scientific verisimilitude were brought into art courses after it was argued that they were worthy of being given degrees. These 'standards' were brought in to all levels of art education throughout the nation in order to achieve some sort of standardisation. However art has always been valued because of its ability to work with variability in the processes it engages with, its ability to be totally at odds with convention in relation to what it does and it often disputes rule governed behaviour. So I have to grit my teeth and force myself to follow the rules whenever I go into an assessment period. I am sometimes amazed at the confidence of my fellow staff as to their ability to put their finger on a correct mark, something I am still worried and hazy about because deep down, I can't reconcile the relationship between numerical measurement and the complex social engagement of art practice. How do I know what is happening inside someone's head? Skinner's behavioural psychology doesn't help me either, his argument that all you need to do is look at the external facts of behaviour in order to deduce competences has long been seen to be very limited, as it fails to differentiate between cultural differences, individual traits, pretence behaviour or other factors which are unavailable to any one observer. In some ways I wish we could operate like the judges in Tansey's image, it would be much more obvious and at least more open to scorn and derision. So what does this mean? Am I an old Romantic? Tansey's drawing makes it appear as if these judges are judging nature itself. Is this a worthy landscape view, is this swirl of cloudscape an 8 or a 9? However the swirl of cloudscape is in fact an anamorphic projection of the Last Judgement by Michelangelo. So are these judges judging one of the most renowned paintings in the history of art; a painting that represents the LAST judgement ever. The judges sit on a checkerboard, one not dissimilar to a painting like Mondrian's 'Composition with Grid 8: Checkerboard Composition with dark colours' of 1919. It is as if the judges have already turned their back on abstraction, now simply using it to sit on. But we remain aware that images have formal, abstract elements that underpin them, the grid of Modernism in effect now becoming the ground on which these judges sit. So are they using the conventions of Modernism to judge Michelangelo? They are figures on a Modernist ground, (figure and ground in Gestalt psychology) judging a distortion, a type of distortion the earliest known example of which is Leonardo's Eye. So are they judging how well a type of projection invented by Leonardo is applied to an image created by his great rival? The gap between what the drawing (noun) means and Tansey's act of making this drawing (verb) is where these questions lie, it is as if he makes a drawing as a trap for our minds.
Leonardo's Eye
The self portrait is a long existing painting trope, so it is no surprise to see Tansey approaching it with his usual love of contradictions. In a monochrome image it is very hard to tell what any particular substance is that is being depicted, and in that difficulty Tansey finds an interesting gap within which to operate.
Mark Tansey: Self Portrait: Graphite
Edward Hopper
In Tansey's image it looks as if its blowing a gale, but if it is, how come the artist is calmly reading a newspaper? Not a book, but a newspaper, a thing that is almost designed to be impossible to read as soon as there is even just a slight gust of wind. What sort of a gale is it? Is this a sandstorm or a rain storm? And what is that fan doing outside on a day like that? The ambiguity of monochrome comes across beautifully in 'White on White' the image that is perhaps Tansey's 'signature' painting. Snow or sand, that is the question, as eskimos meet bedouin tribesmen in a snow/sandstorm. The title 'White on White' of course refers to Malevitch's painting of the same name, once again Tansey is asking us to consider the abstract nature of all constructed images. Tansey asks questions such as if art progresses on the ruins of its past, how can it have a future? Or if art making is propelled by unconscious forces, is there any room for logical debate as to its function? In this case the artist sits reading, he is oblivious to the storm of weather surrounding him. Tansey is renowned for making very 'clever' statements about art practice, statements that suggest he is interested in art as a subject, a way of thinking that doesn't need any contact with 'reality' or anything else outside of debates surrounding the practice of art. So why does the artist need his fan? He must suffer from changes in temperature and like all of us he must get too hot or too cold. So he may appear unconcerned, uninterested in the storm, and of course who would be bothered by painted storms, all of which are viewed by their audiences in the nice cosy environs of art galleries but just like any invigilator in an art gallery, he is still subject to life's realities and it may be raining outside. I'm not sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if Tansey had modelled the newspaper reading figure on Edward Hopper's much earlier painting of Hopper at home with his wife.
White on White
Tansey's working methods are complex and they entail a lot of careful construction in order for them to work, both compositionally and in terms of underlying processes.
Wheel of Language by Mark Tansey
Wheel
Action painting
Tansey has an approach that people who like to solve puzzles will get hours of intellectual enjoyment from. Some of his early paintings are very much one liners, such as 'Action painting' above. A simple idea that plays on the relationship between painting and photography, but you also have to remember that Jackson Pollock died in a car crash and that after the invention of photography some people believed that painting was dead. The fact that a woman artist, working in the old traditional techniques of realism, is calmly measuring up the situation, perhaps also alluding to Pollock's status as very much a macho man and the fact that that 'macho' idea was often tied up with an idea of originality and the 'dangerous' adventure of breaking art's formal boundaries.
One of the most interesting working methods that Tansey uses is that of making photocopies of his collages using a converted photocopier. Before he begins a painting, Tansey will create collages from images that he has collected over the years. He then uses his converted photocopier to make a 'dust' image. The copier drops the carbon toner onto the paper as normal, but he has removed the heating elements that usually fuse the toner onto the paper, so that he has an image that can be easily adjusted or simply fixed as you would a normal charcoal drawing. Finished collages are then fixed, photographed and projected onto a blank canvas. Once this is done he often paints the shadow image, as he says, "over-reading it and intentionally getting it wrong."
Drawing and philosophy part three (Object orientated ontology)
A link to my own wrestling with the problem of philosophy and the end of art
A link to my own wrestling with the problem of philosophy and the end of art
The drawings of Glen Baxter
I am very impressed with all the explaination but I am not good in philosofy of how someone make drawing. But I like the drawing. I like drawing. I am still learning how to get ideal target someone become good artist. Thanks for your posting to open my knowledge
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