Image Essay #11

This is a painting created by Mark Tansey called, “Nature Ape.” The picture depicts a monkey walking across a bridge while a man swings from a vine beside him. The reason I chose this picture is to talk about how it contains a monochromatic color scheme. A monochromatic color scheme is a color scheme that uses only one hue (coming from rainbow sequence of the visible spectrum) within a composition. Tansey has chosen for this painting to use a blue monochromatic color scheme. He uses different values of the color, but still only uses one color.
In this painting, I think Mark Tansey is commenting on how humans try to be something they’re not or that they are the real “monkeys” of the animal kingdom. He does this by placing the human on the jungle vine and the monkey on the bridge. The roles have been reversed in each animal. We would typically see a human on the bridge with a monkey on the vine. However, Tansey reverses this within his painting. This is why I think the painting is a comment on how humans are so ridiculous most times that they are the real “monkeys” of the animal kingdom and monkeys are just… monkeys.