My first art “crush"
Much to my parents’ disappointment, I took a lot of art history classes in college, but from those classes, I developed a real appreciation for visual art. I like most genres and painters (to varying degrees) but sometimes artists strike me as soon as I see them.
Raphael, Piero della Francesca, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Frans Hals are classic artists that grab me, but with modern art, I find that it’s a bit more work… after all, I don’t have decades or centuries of curators helping me home in on the best work out there.
Mark Tansey, who arguably was at his peak in the 1980s and 1990s , is one of those artists. I saw his featured exhibit in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 1994 (yes, that dates me) and I saw my very favorite painting of his, Action Painting II, in the Museé des Beaux Arts de Montréal two years ago. I am still in love with his oversized, allegorical, monochromatic works that are instantly approachable, yet deep with meaning buried in symbols, scenes, and faces they display.
