Sunday, January 9, 2011

Plein Aero Space

A painting by Mark Tansey: “Action Painting II”, oil on canvas, 193cm x 279.4 cm, 1984.
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From Aphelis via Atompunk. Thanks, John, who coined the post title!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

The post and painting titles are both pretty funny.

I read that Tansey said he wants his work to stimulate the art dialog(which I take to mean, discussion of what constitutes Art, what's its role, etc.).
This is the first image of his I've seen where that's obvious to me. And it's funny! Thanks for showing it!

Gordon Napier said...

I always found something a little incongruent about traditional paintings of modern subjects, like aeroplanes and spacecraft- a very slow, low tech way of depicting something very fast and high tech. This painting makes a nice ironic statement on that. Obviously it would be impossible to sit and paint a launching space shuttle.

António Araújo said...

>Obviously it would be impossible >to sit and paint a launching space >shuttle.

Hah! That's 'cause you don't got no mad skillz, dude! You just gotta paint *faster*!

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Coffee!! More coffeeee!!! ;)

Dan Gurney said...

I've never seen Tansey's work before. It's brilliant. Sometimes, in argument a picture's worth a million words. Check out this Tansey image, and look at it upside down, too:

http://www.amyscott.com/Images/Mont%20Saint%20Victorie.gif

Unknown said...

That's definitely some action painting, those guys must be fast!

Carole Wayne said...

I do get the wonderful message of this picture, but/and -Everyone should see the wonderful work of artists gathered by NASA to document the first several rocket. Some paintings are still in the Air and Space Museum; there's a beautiful coffee table book

Be said...

This painting is here, in the Montreal Museum of fine arts and i was quite surprised to see it on this blog! I suspect M. Gurney to have seen it when he came for the Waterhouse exhibition in 2009...

It's quite big and very thinly painted, just like a monochromatic underpainting before adding the upper layers of colors. From upclose, you wanna say: "hey, there's nothing on this canvas!"