Francis Tansey

Born in Dundrum, County Dublin in 1959, Francis Tansey took an early interest in art. He was educated in Dublin at Dun Laoghaire College of Art and the National College of Art and Design, graduating in 1978. Tansey was always inclined towards abstract rather than representational fine art painting and drawing, and took a particular interest in colour theory and hard edge painting. During a trip to the United States in 1982 he encountered the art of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Mondrian, all of which steered his work to come. Tansey’s work has remained consistent throughout his career. His paintings are composed of geometric rectangular and cylindrical shapes in primary and secondary colours and black. Unlike typical hard-edge painting, the colour fields are not flat but painted with smooth and precise gradations, lending the shapes a three-dimensional quality and a sense that they are moving and rotating, recalling computer graphics. Tansey began painting in this style in the 1980s. In 2011 he said, “unlike when I started to produce this work all those years ago, Geometric colour is everywhere today, with the advance of new technologies and computers, as I knew it would be. But I still value the opportunity to produce it using more traditional methods like paint and canvas.” Tansey’s approach to painting is methodical, employing a number of steps and techniques. Acrylic co-polymer paint is applied with rollers and brushes in thin layers until the desired colour saturation is met. In order to achieve the crisp edges essential to hard-edge painting, tape is laid onto the canvas and pulled away after the paint is applied.