Author: Diversions LA

There are two new photographic books soon to emerge packed with evocative images from artist Scott Tansey. Each are quite different but both represent a lush ethos of images that linger once viewed. Wet Point Lobos and Surfaces present very different topics, but both show astonishing grace.

In Wet Point Lobos, Tansey has captured the shape of vast sweeping landscapes and the intimate, sinuous, sensual closeness of sea and shore. He has truly made Point Lobos his own, giving us a personal and profound a look at a destination that is inherently meaningful for the artist, and for his viewers alike.

In these images of Point Lobos, Tansey gives us the stones, pebbles, sea creatures, tide lines, and sea foam of the Central California Coast as an intimate gift. Each image is a jewel, sparkling and wet: he gives us the visceral texture of sand grains, the roughness of rock layers, the eroded shapes of curving and linear tide pools, the glow of water and sunlight, of winter waters and spring tides.

As a photographic artist, Scott Tansey has captured the shape of vast sweeping landscapes and the intimate, sinuous, sensual closeness of sea and shore. He has truly made Point Lobos his own, giving us a personal and profound look at a destination that is inherently meaningful for the artist, and for his viewers alike.

The cross hatching of sedimentary rock reminds us of well-worn skin; foamy waves erupting through narrow cliff-side channels pulses like a clear, wild blood through our veins. Cerulean blue stone, caressed by calm reminds the viewer of an astronaut’s glimpse of our blue marble Earth from space.

This is Wet Point Lobos: a miracle of time, tide, and tenacity, a world in which the viewer can wade through images as cool and alluring as the sea itself.

Moving from sea to land, Tansey’s Surfaces vary, but color explodes in an utterly unique and mesmerizing series of images. As Tansey explains, “Photographs are created, not merely captured,” and his creation of surfaces makes the world around us vibrate in a wild explosion of color and force.

Using post-production techniques that could have been utilized more than a decade earlier, he has shaped a vision that is nonetheless absolutely of this moment, as transforming and dazzling as if the viewer looked through a prismatic screen, exploring compelling kaleidoscopes of color, and a rainbow of resonance.

Altering the color space of simple surfaces alters the mundane, transforming it into something visionary. Whether it is a wall observed outside a restaurant or simply the ground Tansey walks on, these images appear brave and incendiary. Textures are colors, colors are surfaces, color seeps through the pores of every substance revealed in this collection. The artist creates the auras around landscapes, the auroras of opalescent light that make the prosaic into the profound and spiritual.

As a viewer, ask yourself if you can imagine animate life leaving behind a resonant glow, a fresh color field. Tansey certainly provides that here, shaping a new spectrum of light and vision. As he notes, “Hundreds of thousands walk over the surface of [these] image[s] each year…” without seeing within them.

Exotic as many of the artist’s images appear at first glance, this abstract and vivid series of works are based on locations captured less than four miles from where he lives. It is a fascinating change for an artist who has traveled the world’s glaciers, explored cities, cathedrals, and distant seas.  What Tansey has done in these collections is a revelation of what lies within the core of the earth itself.

• Genie Davis; images provided by the artist