Tomas Lasansky

Tomas Lasansky

Artist in his Iowa City studio
Born Tomás Lasansky
(1957-08-31) August 31, 1957
Iowa City, Iowa
Education B.F.A., M.A., M.F.A. University of Iowa
Known for Printmaking, Drawing and Painting
Spouse(s) Charlie Emmert Lasansky (b. 1960)

Tomás Lasansky ( b. August 31, 1957 ) is an American painter, printmaker, and draftsman living in Iowa City, Iowa. He is best known for large-scale portrait studies of important historical icons.

Biography

Tomás Lasansky was born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa. He is the youngest of six children in a family of visual, literary and performing artists. Tomás developed an early interest in drawing and ceramics and spent most of his childhood making portraits of his older siblings and throwing pots.[1] In the mid-1960s when Tomás was still a young boy his father Mauricio Lasansky, who was an artist of great renown in the United States and abroad, introduced him to the printmaking process. In the early 1970s, when Tomás was about fifteen, he began working as his father's printing assistant. At the time, Mauricio was producing some of his largest and most technically complex color prints. This experience enabled Tomás to familiarize himself with many of the fundamental intaglio techniques that he uses today, such as, hard- and soft-ground etching, engraving, aquatint, scraping, and burnishing.[2] When Tomás turned eighteen he established his own studio in downtown Iowa City and purchased his first printing press. He attended the University of Iowa after a brief enrollment in a ceramics program at Alfred University in New York. At Iowa, Tomás had yet another opportunity to work alongside his father who at the time was the head printmaking professor. Tomás has stated, while reflecting on his early apprenticeship and formal training at the U of I (B.F.A., 1979; M.A., 1983; and M.F.A., 1984) that he credits his father with training him "to understand what it means to be a professional artist."[3] In the mid-1980s Tomás met Donita "Charlie" Ann Emmert, an Iowa born artist who would later become his wife. Tomás's work, like Charlie's, is predominately figurative. Both artists share a passion for portraiture and will often, in their own respective styles, create images of the same subject.[4] Although Tomás continues to draw and make prints, much of his recent work from the past fifteen years is on canvas. He is best known for his large-scale paintings of important historical icons such as Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, and Geronimo.

Ink Splatter Paintings

Lasansky's approach to image making today is intimately linked with his background and familiarity with the printmaking process. This is best understood through a close examination of his acrylic ink splatter paintings. The artist was "able to produce recognizable portraits, as opposed to an abstract mishmash of ink droplets, by developing an innovative way to restrict the splatter of ink across the picture plane. The procedure entails the creation of hand-cut papers templates, each of the same dimension, which expose and protect different yet specific ares of the composition. One template affixed with tape, for instance, would expose Lincoln's overcoat, while another would leave only the background visible. Ink flicked off a brush that passed through the cutout portion of a template becomes part of the image. In turn, the same template acts as a resist, soaking up any ink that misses the mark. The portrait nears completion after all the templates have been used in successive order. This inventive technique inspired in part by Jackson Pollock's pioneering drip paintings, is based on Tomas's experience with color intaglio printmaking. To produce a print of several colors an artist will often work several plates and subject the paper to as many impressions. Where the paper templates have been cut is the equivalent to where they would be inked if they were worked plates."[5]

4 Peaks Press

In 2007 Tomás Lasansky founded the publishing company 4PeaksPress with his associate Richard Gale. In 2010 the company released Tomás Lasansky: Icons and Muses, which chronicles nearly four decades of Lasansky's prints, paintings, and drawings. Lasansky, who is a passionate collector of fine art books, intended icons and muses to be a work of art in and of itself. The collector's edition of the book, which was limited to 300 copies, is encased in a black cloth clamshell box. Each of the 300 collector books is hand-signed and number and includes a folio of four original intaglio prints. Lasansky hand selected a heavy 200 gsm paper with a matte coated finish for its ability to authentically reproduce the colors of his works. The book features 285 chronologically ordered full color plates, first-hand accounts of the artist's life and creative evolution. an academic essay placing his work into an historical context, a collections and exhibition history, and a Catalogue Raisonné of the published prints.

Selected Collections

Notes

  1. ↑ Rory Lasansky, A Son's Perspective, in Tomás Lasansky: Icons and Muses (Iowa City, IA: 4PeaksPress, 2010), 25.
  2. ↑ Charles R. Loving, "Tomás Lasansky," in Mauricio and Tomás Lasansky: Father and Son (South Bend, IN: Snite Museum of Art, University of Notre Dame, 2014), 12.
  3. ↑ Loving, Tomás Lasansky, 12.
  4. ↑ Lasansky, A Son's Perspective, 31.
  5. ↑ Lasansky, A Son's Perspective, 31.

Bibliography

External links

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