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.

I'm a star

I recently posed for a friend, Sangram Majumdar, for a painting in his show at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects. It's one of the main paintings in the show. Having painted so many people it was nice to be on the other end of the process. What was the strangest thing to me wasn't seeing the painting (and I think it's a fantastic painting) in it's finished state but rather seeing how it changed from session to session. He took the painting in very unexpected directions and that is what was so interesting to me. The process was great and I hope to write about it too. I photographed the painting in each of its different states. Sangram projected a space - my wife's aunt and uncle's stair case near Orleans, France - onto me and the wall behind me and even had a door open behind me which made the space even more complex but edited much of that out. You can still see the door handle. The painting has already sold which is a little sad to me as I like it but hopefully it will end up in a public collection.

It's better to be a writer than a painter

I was just at a friend's opening (Sangram Majumdar) and I was introduced as "Neil's a writer and an artist". The writer came first always. I guess that means I need to be posting more often about the writing that I've been doing!

Well the good news is that I have been made a staff writer for Painting Perceptions. I have just finished an interview with Sydney Licht which I feel is very interesting. She's a lovely painter - the work seems simple at first but as you spend just a little time with it, you realize how complex the compositions are. Her use of color is really fantastic as well. great paintings that's for sure

I'll be posting some of my recent events soon. i've got a lot of changes to report

A very late update

As many of you may already know, I spent a couple of months in London. I was really lucky to be able to visit a ton of museums with my son and a ton of galleries. Having lived there 18 years ago, it was really a wonderful experience to see it with new eyes. My previous experience of living London let avoid doing the things that first time visitors often feel the need to do. This let me really focus on seeing a lot of artwork and researching the things that I saw. I have written more articles for Painting Perceptions about artists that I saw there (Judith Green and there will be more to come) and about the history of painting in the UK post World War II Slade School of Art part 1 and Slade School of Art part 2).

My son the critic, didn't think much of the artwork at the Tate Modern - the best piece in the museum according to his taste was the barrier to a sculpture which I've forgotten about.

Despite my encouragement, he also didn't seem to think much Frank Auerbach's drawings at the National Gallery.

But he did seem to really enjoy the Constable room at the Tate Britain - or at least running around the room and being a boy he really loved the jet fighter by Fiona Banner as well.

Oil and Water on Painting Perceptions

I have recently written a review of a show called Oil and Water for my favorite blog, Painting Perceptions. It is, I hope the first of many reviews of shows. I worked Jenny G (aka Jennifer Gilchrist) to finish the article. It was really fantastic speaking with Fred Bancroft and Steven Harvey about the paintings and the process of pulling the show together. Please take a look at the review and if you feel up to, comment on it. I would love the feedback.

I'm incredibly excited that I now have an outlet for writing about art and more specifically painting. Look for more!

Relaunch of my website

I have been a bit remiss in updating my blog and I am very sorry for that but as a consolation prize I have redone my website - nice new fonts, two new cool series of paintings, new email address and a great time for all who visit - come on over and check it out!
neilplotkin.com

Zeuxis Group show

I've been following a blog (Paintingperceptions.com) and read a review of the Zeuxis Group show which is based on a towel. Each artist in the group was given a towel and they needed to create a still life painting with it. This sort of exercise really appeals to me on so many levels. It seems to be a show about a towel but when all the artists incorporate the same object into their paintings, it becomes a show about the artists. The painting becomes a formal study of composition or color or paint or handling of the physical materials or about juxtaposition to other objects. It is what is very interesting to me about the history of painting. People will address the same issue but come up with very different solutions or they take a previous painter's idea and reinterpret the idea to suit their needs. I love that there is a dialog between the works and to artists of the past as well. I thought that I would do my own still life with the same type of towel to "participate" in the show as well.

On the posting, there is a link to Imogen Sara Smith's wonderful essay for the catalog of the show which discusses still life painting.

my new life

this my new life.he's pretty cute though!



this is the drawing on mylar. it was finished by someone moving the set up before i was done. that's life.

Updating my website

I am currently in the process of trying to update my website to reflect some of the work I have done in the past year. I have hundreds of paintings to cull from, but it will be pretty easy as the best work always stands out. The work has evolved a great deal over the past year to a point where I am very happy with the direction I am heading in. This is the first time that I have been able to say that in almost 20 years of painting. I am happy for my mistakes and failures in the past as they are now useful tools in my work. The last few blog entries are a taste of what the work will be like.

On another note, I will be heading to the south of France with my family for a family wedding and Christmas with Oscar's great-Grandparents, parents, aunt and uncle and his favorite cousin. I am hoping to be able to do a little work while I'm there. It would be a shame not to!

Crab Apples - another view

This is a similar painting to the one i had posted previously.

Gourds

As I work on these paintings, I am thinking about borders. Borders, edges, and boundaries are porous and malleable. There are very rarely true and hard lines demarcating the ending and beginning of anything. Each side is always mixing with the other influencing the other and eventually creating something new.

Crab Apples

Newest Creation

Oscar Albert Plotkin!
He's here and doing great. Born on October 12th and has been pretty awesome ever since (not counting diaper change meltdowns). He's super cool!

His middle name is after Alberto Giacometti but we thought Alberto would be a bit (to say the least) pretentious so he's Albert.

checking in

As I have recently moved house and am very busy preparing for an addition to our family, I have been very remiss in posting. I'm still painting (between doctors, lawyers, contractors, etc) and the work is finally on the track that I am very interested in pursuing. I have a few paintings that I will post in the near future. I am very pleased with the direction that I am heading in and will hopefully continue developing for a long time to come. I am sorry that the posts have been pretty sparse as of late - and I suspect that once (God willing) we have another member in our family i will be posting between diaper changes at very best. Stay tuned.