Illustrations

 Kozyndan

Evan “Doc” Shaner

Selcuk Demirel

Reey Whaar

Gerard DuBois 

 Tomasz Walenta

Jean-Francois Martin

 Roland Sarkany

Jean-Francois Martin

 Mieczyslaw Gorowski

 Mieczyslaw Gorowski

 John Mattos

Istvan Orosz

Victo Ngai (Ngai Chuen Ching) 

 Tiffany Bozic

 Daniela Uhlig

Roland Sarkany

 Rudi Hurzlmeier

 Gerard DuBois

Paul Zwolak

Tomasz Walenta

Eric Drooker

Milo Manara

Scott McKowen

Scott McKowen

Scott McKowen 

 Selcuk Demirel

 Gerard DuBois 

Carmen Segovia

 Selcuk Demirel

Karine Daisay

Ein Geschäftsmann schickt seinen Sohn Ferdinand nach Buta, um dem Herrn Komsy zwölfhundert Peltonturbinen zu verkaufen. 'Und warum soll er sie kaufen?', fragt Ferdinand. - 'Und warum soll er sie nicht kaufen?', fragt sein Vater zurück. In Buta angekommen, wird Ferdinand vom ungewohnt freizügigen Zimmermädchen generös bedient und vom Sohn des Herrn Komsy auf vorbildlich verdorbene Weise empfangen, während die liederliche Tochter des Hauses bei der Begrüßung die Hand nicht aus ihrer Unterhose kriegt. 

Oleg Medvedev

Mickey Duzyj

Agata Endo-Nowicka 

 Pierre Mornet

 Karine Daisay

 Gianni De Conno

 Leonid Tishkov

 Shaun Tan

 Roland Sarkany

 Francesco Bongiorni 

Francesco Bongiorni

Oleg Medvedev

Gerard DuBois

Jean-Francois Martin

Tomasz Walenta

Mark Tansey - Rifts and Resonances

A painted picture is a vehicle. You can sit in your driveway and take it apart or you can get in it and go somewhere. (Mark Tansey)

Mark Tansey, Pleasure of the Text, 1986

One would have to be like a taxi, a waiting line, a line of flight, a bottleneck, a traffic jam, green and red lights, slight paranoia, difficult relations with the police. Being an abstract and broken line, a zigzag, that slips 'between'. (Deleuze/Parnet, Dialogues)

 Mark Tansey, Doubting Thomas, c. 1985

Mark Tansey was born in San Jose, California in 1949. His parents were both art historians, so he had an early introduction to art. These early childhood experiences had a profound effect on Tansey's painting style from the inception of his career as an artist. From the time he was a young child, Mark Tansey knew that he wanted to continue the family tradition and pursue a future in the art industry. He attended Saturday art classes at the San Francisco Art Institute in his early teen years and made a habit of regularly visiting art museums in the area. Beginning in 1969, Tansey spent three years studying at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. 

Mark Tansey, The Innocent Eye Test, 1981

After graduating, Tansey worked as an assistant at the San Jose State University Gallery. In 1974, Tansey enrolled in the graduate program at Hunter College in New York City. He spent four years studying there. While attending Hunter College, he made a scale reproduction of part of his textbook, The Structure of Art, in acrylic on paper. He also painted a series of ten by ten inch pieces that analyzed methods of representation and illusion through differences in perspective. He filled notebooks with human gestures and made collages of magazine clippings and book pages. These he organized into files centering on specific themes and has covered over 125 themes thus far. When looking for inspiration for new paintings, he references these notebooks and works from them.

Mark Tansey, Take One, 1982

Tansey acquired a two story studio in downtown New York City and works there from late afternoon throughout the night almost every day. The first floor of his studio is reserved for final paintings only, while the second floor is where he creates all of the preparatory sketches and variations that inspire his completed works. He derives his inspiration from photographic reproductions and magazine clippings, and works in stages of small sketches and drawings until he is prepared for the final painting.

Mark Tansey, Judgement of Paris, 1982

Many of Tansey's paintings are monochromatic and seem old-fashioned. Tansey lays down a layer of monochrome pigment on canvas that can be altered easily only before it dries. This leaves him only about a six hour window in which to complete his alterations. As such, he works in a style similar to fresco painters, painting in segments that he can finish in this short time frame. Tansey creates his images by pulling away and wiping pigment, so that various textures and tones are produced on the canvas. He adds pigment to darken certain areas; and when he wipes away pigment, the white of the canvas shows through the thin layer of paint to lighten the area. 

Mark Tansey, Achilles and the tortoise, 1986

Mark Tansey - On rift and resonance: "In my earlier work I was trying to learn how to bring meaning to the image, and was having difficulty activating the figure and image as a whole. Magritte's eight methods of bringing about the crisis of the object isolation, modification, hybridization, scale change, accidental encounters, double image puns, paradox, double viewpoints in one came as a revelation. It made it apparent to me that crises and conflicts were results of oppositions and contradictions and these were what was necessary to activate or motivate a picture. Magritte's work also led me to wonder if crisis could take place on other levels of content, more quietly, internally, more plausibly." (Arthur C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions)

 

Mark Tansey, Action Painting II, 1984

Mark Tansey - On the value of illustration: "If in paintings there have been problems in linking image and idea, one key may be found buried deep in the practice of illustration. Illustration, having been banished from high art as commercial and slavish to an assigned message, nevertheless is where art begins. The only significant difference that I can find at this point between illustration and art is that the former traditionally involves doing someone else's idea rather than one's own." (Arthur C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions)

Mark Tansey, Westface, 2004

Upon closer examination, hidden imagery appears in unexpected places. The snowball in Snowman doubles as Karl Marx's head, turned on its side; Nietzsche's portrait emerges from the mountainside in West Face (above); an anamorphic portrait of James Joyce is contained within the wake of a speeding boat in Wake. In such paintings, figures and landscape are interchangeable as images merge and recede, only to reappear again. 

 Mark Tansey, EC 101, 2009

In EC 101 Tansey traces the lineage of economic theory by inscribing human faces into a creviced mountain, a structural device that recalls his earlier use of landscape to blur the traditional distinction between figure and ground. At the top of the mountain are classical economists such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill while the heterodox economists such as Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, and John Maynard Keynes are at the base. In a parallel narrative, Dante and Virgil stand in the lower half of this painting, which is a reversed image of the mountain.

Mark Tansey, Duet, 2004

Tansey has painted his most recent works in ultramarine, a color that combines the depth and complexities of black with the lightness and transparency of blue and which imparts the feel of now-obsolescent blueprint.  Rendered in a single hue, his paintings have a precise photographic quality that is reminiscent of scientific illustration, achieved by applying gesso then washing, brushing and scraping paint into it.

 Mark Tansey, Forward Retreat, 1986

In his painting Forward Retreat (above), Tansey uses red tones that elicit images of blood and danger. It lends a certain urgency to the battle that is not actually depicted in the painting itself. In fact, the scene's composition, which shows the soldiers reflected in a shallow pool, has an air of mild serenity. This juxtaposition of danger and battle with the contradictory serenity of still water heightens the meaning of the red painting. 

Mark Tansey, The Key, 1984

Archangel Michael in the upper left reminded me at Inferno, VII Canto:


Not causeless is this journey to the abyss;
Thus is it willed on high, where Michael wrought
Vengeance upon the proud adultery."

Mark Tansey, Derrida Queries de Man, 1990

 

"What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time?" "The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." (Shakespeare, The Tempest)

Mark Tansey, Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight, 1981 

“La fonction de l'art n'est jamais d'illustrer une vérité, ou même une interrogation. Elles est de mettre au monde des interrogations, qui ne se connaissent pas encore elles-mêmes.” (Alain Robbe-Grillet)

 Mark Tansey, Still Life 

"Life is a matter of description and re-description and it has no meaning, apart from the metaphor you happen to be using at any given time." (Richard Rorty)

 Mark Tansey, A Short History of Modernist Painting, 1982 

"Metaphoric redescription (Richard Rorty's term) is a function that is becoming increasingly interesting in light of the inadequacies of the term "representation," in that pictures don't actually represent anything." (Mark Tansey) 

Mark Tansey, Purity Test, 1982

Indians on houseback gaze down at Robert Smithson's earth sculpture Spiral Jetty.  Smithson had sought to create a pure image. The Indians, unware of the spiral's function as a work of art, attempt to decipher it as a symbol.

Tansey has a process for generating ideas for his paintings. Part of this process involves his “wheels”. The wheel consists of three concentric circles on a center pivot. Each circle is labeled with words in such a way that one can spin the wheels and come up with phrases formed from the combination of the three circles’ words. The most lavish wheel, a large wooden table with a lazy susan-like top, has 180 entries on each of is three rings. From the inside out the words are nouns, participles, and objects, which lead us to phrases such as: “Borgesian cartographers redeploying jouissance” or “stock characters suspending disbelief in unshakable foundations”. The wooden table wheel allows for over 5 million possible phrases. Tansey then takes the created phrases and categorizes them as “motifs”, “oppositions”, “problems”, etc. on a grid creating juxtapositions and further combinations to use as ideas for new or ongoing works.

 Mark Tansey, Triumph of the New York School, 1984

The right side features such NY art figures as Greenberg, Pollack, Rothko, etc., in army uniforms around army vehicles. On the left side, Andre Breton’s back is turned to us (he is signing the treaty of surrender), Picasso is the one in the fur coat, while Duchamp stands rather aloofly, hands in pockets.

Mark Tansey, Mount Sainte-Victoire, 1987

In Mount Sainte-Victoire the soldiers of poststructuralism and deconstruction - Jean Baudrillard, Barthes, and Derrida - disrobe in the shadow of Cézanne's Mount Sainte-Victoire. Shedding their uniforms, they are transformed in their reflections into women. The men on the shore are flanked by the arching trees of Cézanne's 1906 Bathers.

 

Mark Tansey, Triumph Over Mastery

 Mark Tansey, Discarding the frame

Charles Sheeler

In a period such as ours when only a comparatively few individuals seem to be given to religion, some form other than the Gothic cathedral must be found. Industry concerns the greatest numbers—it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression. (Charles Sheeler) 

Charles Sheeler, Steam Turbine, 1939

Charles Sheeler, the son of a steamer-line executive, was born in Philadelphia in 1883. His education included instruction in industrial drawing and the applied arts at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia (1900–1903), followed by a traditional training in drawing and painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1903–6). He visited Europe with his fellow students in 1904–5, and traveled abroad again in 1908–9 with his parents and his friend Morton Schamberg, another young artist. During this second trip, he developed a particular interest in the Italian painters of the late Middle Ages, particularly Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca, and their simple, strong massing of forms. In 1909, he visited the Paris home of Michael and Sarah Stein, early patrons of Picasso and Braque; this experience inspired him to work in a Cubist style for several years.

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, Clapboards, 1936

In 1910, Sheeler and Schamberg rented an eighteenth-century stone house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania; around this time, Sheeler taught himself photography. He worked as a freelance photographer, documenting local buildings for architects; a few years later, he began to photograph the interior of his own house. He shaped its rough-hewn spaces with light and shadow, drawing out their underlying compositions of solids and spaces. He also photographed and drew the local vernacular architecture, particularly barns, whose straightforward design he admired.

Charles Sheeler, Bucks County Barn, 1940

 

Throughout the 1910s, Sheeler formed lasting professional relationships with several important figures in the New York art world, including Alfred Stieglitz. He supplemented his income by photographing works of art for collectors and galleries. He participated in important group shows, including the International Exhibition of Modern Art (commonly known as the Armory Show, 1913). During this decade, he also began using his own photographs as sources for paintings.

Charles Sheeler, Catastrophe No. 2, 1944

In 1920, Sheeler collaborated with the photographer Paul Strand on the short film Manhatta, a short expressive film about New York City based on portions of Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The six-minute film spans an imaginary day in the life of New York City, beginning with footage of Staten Island ferry commuters and culminating with the sun setting over the Hudson River. It has been described as the first avant-garde film made in America. Its many brief shots and dramatic camera angles emphasize New York's photographic nature. Manhatta, was filmed to emphasize the dramatic viewpoints and abstract compositions of a rapidly changing cityscape. Sheeler would investigate similar motifs in his photography, painting, and graphic art of the 1920s, turning his eye to the monoliths of New York's modern architecture and the canyons of its avenues. The sharpness and clarity of his vision associated him with the group of artists working in a style termed Precisionist.

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, Skyscrapers, 1922 

 

 

Despite the lines from Whitman's poems, Manhatta is not really Whitmanesque in feeling, because it either omits the people of New York or sees them as molecules in a crowd, abstract parts of "one-million-footed Manhattan, unpent". Strand and Sheeler's Manhattan is a hard, clear, abstract place: not always as grim in its alienation as Strand's 1915 photo of businessmen (below) trailing long black chains of morning shadows as they scurry to work past the blank, tomblike windows of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Building, but depopulated enough to act as a series of signs only for itself. 

Paul Strand, Wall Street, New York, 1915

In late 1927 and early 1928, Sheeler spent six weeks documenting the Ford Motor Company's automobile plant in River Rouge, Michigan, as part of the promotional campaign for the release of the Model A Ford. Sheeler's thirty-two photographs of the Ford plant depict its acres of gleaming, massive machinery, rather than the human process of labor. They celebrate America's ideals of power and productivity, although there is also a strangely forbidding atmosphere to the unpopulated scenes. 

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company, 1927

 

The painting that most succinctly expressed Sheeler's feelings about big industry is American Landscape (below). It holds no nature at all, except for the sky and the water of a dead canal. Whatever can be seen is man-made, and the view has a curious and embalmed serenity, produced by the regular cylinders of silos and smokestack and the dark arms of the loading machinery to the right. 

Charles Sheeler, American Landscape, 1930

In 1927, Sheeler and his wife Katharine had moved to South Salem, New York, a small town located approximately fifty miles north of Manhattan. While living there, Sheeler expanded his collection of early American furniture and decorative arts. He prized these items for their simplicity, noting, "No embellishment meets the eye. Beauty of line and proportion through excellence of craftsmanship make the absence of ornament in no way an omission." Many of these possessions appeared in Sheeler's photographs and paintings of the 1930s, in complex arrangements of pattern and form. These domestic interiors recall a vanished preindustrial past, while emphasizing the artistic status of local handicrafts. 

 

 

Charles Sheeler, American Interior, 1934

From 1926 through 1931, Sheeler worked as a freelance photographer, shooting celebrity portraits and fashion photography for Vogue and Vanity Fair. As Sheeler attained broader recognition for his precise yet evocative interpretations of utilitarian forms, he continued to attract prestigious commissions. In 1939–40, he traveled across the country on assignment for Fortune magazine, photographing locations for a series of paintings on the theme of "Power." The six finished paintings depicted icons of American industry such as airplanes, locomotives, power plants, and dams. Meanwhile, Sheeler was also the subject of a biography written by the historian and critic Constance Rourke (1938) and a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (1939). 

 

 

Charles Sheeler, Suspended Power, 1939

In 1939, Sheeler married his second wife, Musya Sokolova (he had been widowed by Katharine's death in 1933); the couple resided in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. Sheeler worked for the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Publications from 1942 to 1945, photographing a wide range of works from the collection, including Assyrian reliefs, classical Greek and Roman sculpture, European painting, and Chinese objects. 

 

 

Charles Sheeler, On a Shaker's Theme, 1956

As he entered the 1950s, Sheeler developed a distinctive late style. He still depicted urban architecture and industrial facilities, but he reduced objects to flat planes, rather than volumes, and pared away more detail than ever before. In works such as Golden Gate (below), he also devised complex, multiple-viewpoint compositions by overlapping two or more photographic negatives of the same subject and then transferring the resulting, synthesized image to canvas. 

 

 Charles Sheeler, Golden Gate, 1955

In these later years, Sheeler's art was the subject of several retrospective exhibitions. After he suffered a debilitating stroke in 1959, Sheeler was no longer able to make art; his life was ended by another stroke in 1965. He left behind a body of work that explored the balance between abstraction and representation, photography and painting, an increasingly mechanized present and a more homespun past.

 

 

Charles Sheeler, Rolling-Power, 1939

Wheels and disk driver of a Model J3A Hudson Thoroughbred locomotive (below), one of the ten streamlined versions of the engine designed to pull the legendary Twentieth Century Limited. The train was considered the most beautiful and modern steam locomotive for passenger travel in America. 

 

Model J3A Hudson Thoroughbred Locomotive

 

 Charles Sheeler, Power, 1940

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, Water, 1945

  Water depicts one of the power generators built by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s, when hydroelectric power was being distributed throughout the Tennessee River region of the United States.

 

 

Charles Sheeler, River Rouge Plant, 1932

 

 Charles Sheeler, Classic Landscape, 1931

 

 Charles Sheeler, Amoskeag Canal, 1948

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, The Artist Looks at Nature, 1943

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, View of New York, 1931

 

 

 Charles Sheeler, Cactus, 1931

 

 Charles Sheeler, Americana, 1931