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Lot Essay
Mark Tansey's Study for Nocture reveals the artist in full control of his powers as a conceptual artist and as one of the great painters of our time. The present painting employs the signature monochromatic palette for which Tansey is famous: an ultramarine blue, with an incorporation of all shades of this dramatic color.
An enthusiast of witty imagery as well as plays on words, Tansey purposefully chooses a title with multiple connotations: "nocturne" is not only a musical composition suggestive of night, but its root word is a clever reference to a circular motif that repeatedly appears in the painting.
The metaphor applies to microcosm and macrocosm. In the sky we see the movement of stars as if in a time lapse photograph. This in turn is echoed by a rotating beacon of light emanating from the lighthouse, and reinforced by a sense of play by the turning carousel at the lighthouse's base. The metaphor continues with the eddy in the foreground, a sweeping, turbulent swirl of white in the deep blue sea. Eventually, the recurring circular motif becomes much more than a purely visual element; it becomes a geometric symbol of the interstices of time and space.
In the notes to a monograph of his work, Tansey states: "There is really very little that is visible in the format of a picture. The value of thinking in terms of a crossroads or pictorial intersection is that if not all that much is visible, then what little there is ought to involve vital trajectories and points of collision and encounter between a variety of cultural, formal or figural systems" (M. Tansey, quoted in A.C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York, 1992, p. 132).
A deliberately elongated canvas provides the necessary framework for this collision. Tansey vertically stacks the sky and the sea to fully occupy the composition, an emphasis of their vast expanse in nature, while placing land on a separate axis to pictorially intersect the two. Tansey often employs visual tricks to challenge the viewer's understanding of art. In this case to suggest three-dimensionality, he suggests a third axis with the incorporation of the lighthouse: understanding how lighthouses function, the viewer anticipates the beacon of light will complete its rotation, eventually shining out from the canvas into the viewer's realm of reality. "He seeks to lure us ever more deeply into the flux of time and the gaps of space by drawing the viewer into the work of art and drawing the work of art into the field of the viewer...Within his frame of reference, time is no longer a prison from which we seek to escape but is the vital medium of life itself" (M. C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & the Ends of Representation, Chicago and London, 1999, p. 132).
This concept is echoed a second time in the work, where subtle ambiguities in composition challenge the viewer's understanding that the earth, sky and sea exist as three separate entities. As the waves crash onto the shores of the land, and the concentric circles of stars disappear behind the horizon, the three realms fuse together as one, adopting an infinite existence--as infinite as the circumference of a circle, as the spectrum of time.
An enthusiast of witty imagery as well as plays on words, Tansey purposefully chooses a title with multiple connotations: "nocturne" is not only a musical composition suggestive of night, but its root word is a clever reference to a circular motif that repeatedly appears in the painting.
The metaphor applies to microcosm and macrocosm. In the sky we see the movement of stars as if in a time lapse photograph. This in turn is echoed by a rotating beacon of light emanating from the lighthouse, and reinforced by a sense of play by the turning carousel at the lighthouse's base. The metaphor continues with the eddy in the foreground, a sweeping, turbulent swirl of white in the deep blue sea. Eventually, the recurring circular motif becomes much more than a purely visual element; it becomes a geometric symbol of the interstices of time and space.
In the notes to a monograph of his work, Tansey states: "There is really very little that is visible in the format of a picture. The value of thinking in terms of a crossroads or pictorial intersection is that if not all that much is visible, then what little there is ought to involve vital trajectories and points of collision and encounter between a variety of cultural, formal or figural systems" (M. Tansey, quoted in A.C. Danto, Mark Tansey: Visions and Revisions, New York, 1992, p. 132).
A deliberately elongated canvas provides the necessary framework for this collision. Tansey vertically stacks the sky and the sea to fully occupy the composition, an emphasis of their vast expanse in nature, while placing land on a separate axis to pictorially intersect the two. Tansey often employs visual tricks to challenge the viewer's understanding of art. In this case to suggest three-dimensionality, he suggests a third axis with the incorporation of the lighthouse: understanding how lighthouses function, the viewer anticipates the beacon of light will complete its rotation, eventually shining out from the canvas into the viewer's realm of reality. "He seeks to lure us ever more deeply into the flux of time and the gaps of space by drawing the viewer into the work of art and drawing the work of art into the field of the viewer...Within his frame of reference, time is no longer a prison from which we seek to escape but is the vital medium of life itself" (M. C. Taylor, The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey & the Ends of Representation, Chicago and London, 1999, p. 132).
This concept is echoed a second time in the work, where subtle ambiguities in composition challenge the viewer's understanding that the earth, sky and sea exist as three separate entities. As the waves crash onto the shores of the land, and the concentric circles of stars disappear behind the horizon, the three realms fuse together as one, adopting an infinite existence--as infinite as the circumference of a circle, as the spectrum of time.