Mark Tansey, Christian Schumann, and James Rosenquist

These next three painters are very different from one another. Of course, I'm interested in each for separate reasons.

Mark Tansey

I LOVE the paintings I came across by Mark Tansey. First off, I saw the detail he uses, and I'm impressed! Eventually I would like to be able to tighten up my paintings to get to his sort of style. (I also realize I have a ways to go, but.. one day!) I like that it's not so smooth to the point where I forget it's a painting. As much as that's extremely impressive and amazing, I don't think that's what painting should be. The majority of us would probably never paint if we had to aspire to hyper-realistic approaches. I'll leave that to Chuck Close (who comes up soon in the blog, actually). Tansey definitely sets a mood easily in his paintings just because of his excessive use of monochromatic color schemes. That I can definitely relate to upon completing my own monochromatic still life. His however, seem a lot darker and moodier- whether it's an epic outdoor/historical scene or just a person in their home doing a mundane task. Here are some good examples of what I'm talking about:



I also believe that he must have had an interesting sense of humor. I think it's definitely present- especially after looking at the cow picture above. That's something I'd like to do too. It'll be sort of like a secret kind of funny. Unexpected. Mark Tansey is able to show his wit and also be an extremely awesome painter at the same time.

Christian Schumann

Unlike Mark Tansey, ..Nope, that's it. He's unlike Mark Tansey. At first I wasn't sure if I liked Schumann's artwork, but then after I looked at it longer, I started to feel something for it. Recently, I began looking into illustration types of art, and that's exactly what this reminds me of. Not to mention- it also reminds me of Where's Waldo- but then agan it all comes full circle because Where's Waldo is a series of illustrated picture books.

His art definitely takes me to another world.. A world full of things that don't really exist and where everything is colorful. It appears as if he puts a lot of time and effort into what he makes, and in the end it pays off. These also look a lot more like drawings than paintings, but I think that's possibly going to be a theme for me.

James Rosenquist

Back to the flat, one dimensional pieces! It's funny how many I've already looked at because it's not my style at all. What I find attractive about his works though is his references to pop culture and society. If I  have little inspiration, I often find myself going through pictures of my favorite celebrities, and I'll start drawing them. It helps me figure out other inspirations I might have. Something else I like, but I don't actually do, is the collage style. In a lot of his pieces that I saw, it looks like he cuts out and places separate pictures together to make one of his own. Within that, he overlaps paint strokes to make one crazy mess. Now, I don't think I can allow myself to ever make a crazy mess of a painting- not now- the only time you'll find me doing that is when I've hit that point where I'm so frustrated I paint different colored strokes of nonsenses all over the painting and get rid of it. I did that when I was younger. ..Everything always ended in finger painting.. ...Always.

 

It's almost as if it's a magazine layout that's been stretched and pulled in all sorts of directions. Or maybe it's every magazine advertisement on top of one another. Regardless, I think they're pretty cool. He keeps everything unique! The colors are loud, and the images don't have to make too much sense at first glance. I think maybe James Rosenquist is a risk taker to begin with- something I need to work on in general, and with my art.