Artemis II

Apr 1, 2026 · 1 min read

Mark Tansey, Action Painting II, 1984. Oil on canvas. A group of painters in a field attempt to capture a rocket launch on canvas. — Mark Tansey, *Action Painting II*, 1984. Oil on canvas. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Feeling a certain kind of way today.

The painting

Action Painting II is part of the permanent collection at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Tansey, born in San Jose in 1949, built his career on monochromatic paintings that layer art-historical references into scenes that read as documentary realism. The title references Harold Rosenberg's 1952 essay coining "action painting" to describe the gestural abstraction of de Kooning and Pollock. Tansey inverts the term: his "action" is literal (a rocket launch), and his "painters" are representational artists doing the opposite of what Rosenberg described.

The mission

Artemis II launched April 1, 2026 at 18:35 EDT from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center. Four astronauts - Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen - on the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

References

[1] Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. "Action Painting II - Mark Tansey." https://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/works/3539/

[2] NASA. "Artemis II." https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-ii/

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