Mark Tennant

BIOGRAPHY: 

Mark Tennant received a B.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore, and an M.F.A. from the New York Academy of Art, in New York City. For the years 2008 and 2009, he was the Director of Graduate Fine Art Painting at Academy of Art University, in San Francisco, where he had been an instructor since 1998. Among other exhibitions, his paintings have twice been displayed in the Salon d’Automne, in Paris. He has taught Museum Copying at the Louvre, Paris, at the Metropolitan in New York, and the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

Education
M.F.A. New York Academy
B.F.A. Maryland Institute, College of Art

artistic approach: 

Mark Tennant probably doesn't listen to rap and his art couldn't be more classic. Tennant studied at such traditional schools as the Mayland Institute College of Art in Baltimore or the New York Academy of Art. He was director of the Academy of Art at the University of San Francisco. His works have been exhibited in spaces as far removed from modernity as the Salon d'Automne in Paris. Nevertheless, here we are fascinated by some of Tennant's more recent paintings.
His approach has a lot to do with Impressionism, the search for light and the movement of certain avant-gardes from the beginning of the 20th century. His works consist of dynamic touches and areas of color that threaten realism and rely on the transmission of implicit emotions through colors and shapes. And yet, it turns out that this technique testifies to urban culture and youth. The look that Mark Tennant poses on this youth is the most interesting of recent years. The artist captures the energy of urban life in a more than perfect way. Girls, and sometimes boys, with generic faces that exude an ambiguous but contagious beauty. Far from the precepts of digital and post-digital, fully anchored in classical techniques, Mark Tennant proves that, sometimes, like a polaroid, the artist's eye reveals snapshots of urban culture.