[This is the transcript for our video analysis of Mark Tennant’s “Clothesline”.]
The greatest painting of the 21st century is not what you think it is.
It isn’t abstract, but it also isn’t very realistic.
It’s not “epic,” it’s not dramatic, it isn’t political or historical or even all that psychological.
The painting is quite simple—though it still takes its time.
It is at once specific and universal.
It is Mark Tennant’s “Clothesline,” which he painted in 2018:
This is the best visual representation of memory and nostalgia that I’ve ever seen. An unknown woman, without a face, stands with her laundry basket as the sun yellows the green of the grass.
The painting is impressionistic, with sharp, angular shapes, blotches of paint which imply reflections, and dark streaks which suggest trees, and the shadows underneath those trees.
The woman appears white but is not pale. In fact, her skin is so rich that her basket seems to gather and concentrate her skin-tones. You know the sun is extremely bright and hot, not because there is a whole lot of yellow, but because of how dramatic the shadows and the whites are.
In fact, the reason why the woman is so visible and her skin so rich is because the sun is at her back, yet most of her body is in shadow. In other words, Mark Tennant delivers the opposite of what you expect while intensifying the color and strength of this memory.
And this painting is all about memory: how memories form, but even more so how they are remembered.
For example, consider the woman’s face. It is anonymous, with no eyes, nose, or mouth, yet her posture is slightly bent and her body relaxed as if she is smiling and happy to see the viewer—because the viewer is the one constructing this memory.
The angularity of Mark Tennant’s shapes is not just some personal choice. Rather, it helps emphasize how these clothes are “stuck” in the wind—”stuck” in a specific, split-second instant of time. In fact, these clothes ARE the painting’s time-stamp. The woman can’t really do that herself. Who knows how long she’s been standing there, smiling (without smiling) at the viewer?
Yet the clothes make the moment clear-cut, specific, and unambiguous, even though the clothes’ shadows aren’t 100% logical—exactly, by the way, as one might expect of a memory. And although the painting is called “Clothesline,” you don’t actually see the clothesline. It isn’t even two-dimensional space. It has been flattened almost to non-existence. It might very well be the least important part of this memory, and yet, it is the invisible thread which seems to hold everything together.
You might have never been here, in this place. You might have never been in love. If you are old enough, it might even feel like you have never been young. But you have some memory, somewhere, which follows the same logic as this painting.
In other words, Mark Tennant crafted the universal out of the specific, and this is why “Clothesline” is the greatest painting of the 21st century.
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