Reply #29: Favorite living artist: Mark Tansey [View All]

His paintings embody visual puns, or riddles on art history and/or criticism. He's got one, for example, where Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler and a bunch of other abstract expressionists are in a small boat on choppy water, watching Jackson Pollock walk away on it! This is not only a comment on how Pollock showed these artists a whole new way of painting, but it's also a subtle joke on the whole concept of the picture plane, that Pollock's vision underscored that the canvas was essentially a surface you could do anything with, including walk on.

His technique is quite odd. His paintings are monochromatic, in a commercial art style from a generation or two ago, and the specific technique starts with coloring his whole canvas that color, then painting over it with white, and daubing and scraping off the white to produce the image. He may add more color from time to time, often in the form of text silkscreened on. He has one painting that's a parody of the notorious image of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Moriarty duking it out on the cliff face, but in Tansey's version, the rock texture comes from that text, smeared just past the point of legibility. And Tansey's title is "Derrida Queries DeMan."

My favorite dead artists include Frida Kahlo, Max Ernst, Auguste Rodin and Hiroshige.