E mail!

After many many hours of work - ok not work but wasted time of sitting on hold with many different companies, I now have email at neil@neilplotkin.com! Wooooo Hoooo!

So much going on but so little time

So the opening at Westbeth was really fantastic and thank you so much to everyone who came out! It certainly was a real honor to be chosen by Xico Greenwald and to show with so many artists that I have admired for so many many years. The show will be up for until October 4th at Westbeth so if you're in the neighborhood please come by.

I will be on the panel at the closing of Yearning Upwards at the Painting Center on Saturday September 27th. It should be interesting as we'll be talking about so many different aspects of painting. There is also an insightful interview by Brett Baker on The Painter's Table with the curator and artist Emily Berger. I get a nice mention in it by him and am very honored by his comments:

"In his catalogue essay for Yearning Upwards, Neil Plotkin makes a case that painting a tree is akin to riffing on a jazz standard in that the “standard offers the opportunity to consider a familiar subject from a different point of view.” His observation made me realize how much the selection of a novel subject has become the dominant standard of originality in the last half century. Subject matter often matters more than its interpretation in contemporary art, but this show demonstrates the opposite can be true."

Please read the entire interview and if you're interested the essay as well.

New website with new work!

I have just posted my new website with lots of new work! Please take a look and let me know what you think!

City as Subject

Here is the invite of the City as subject. The opening is Saturday the 20th of September between 6 and 8. If you can come by please do.

Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?

Well it certainly has been a long time. I do have a few things to announce. The first is a recent catalog essay that I wrote for a great show at the Painting Center - Yearning Upwards. The other is that I will have some paintings included in the show The City as Subject at Westbeth. The show focuses on work done that has used the city as inspiration. I'm very excited to be included in a show with so many great artists. I would like to thank to Xico Greenwald for including me in the show.

Top 10

I've been writing a for about a year and a half now for PaintingPerceptions.com. It's been a really wonderful experience and I really enjoy doing it. I've recently posted two interviews with Sydney Lichtand Alex Kanevsky. The interview with Sydney Licht was picked as a top 10 blog post by the Huffington Post which is a really wonderful honor. I'll be posting more information about the writing I've been doing as time goes on.

New Work

So it's been a very long time since I last posted work. I now have a new studio outside my house which has been transformative. I'm able to do work and focus on it without worrying about my son. And I get to use all the solvents I want which had made my painting very difficult at home.

Before I had moved my studio out of the house, I started to draw piles of my art books. I had initially wanted to take piles of white paper and create landscapes with the paper so I piled my art books up to see what that would be like. I did a bunch of drawings of the piles to see if it was something I was interested in pursuing. As it turns out the books are much more interesting to me than the paper would be. I wanted something that would be all white and the pages of the books are ostensibly white but through age and printing nothing is actually white. So I'm painting all white things where nothing is actually white at all.