ARTIST STATEMENT

The following are several of the large scale-oil paintings I made between 2000 and 2005. These works have for subjects a rather varied collection of historical events which have in common only that they have been personal obsessions of mine. There is nothing like a thematic program, though looking back, it’s clear that specific subjects have been particularly compelling for me.

There are moments in the lives of artists in which they find themselves confronted by power. Some of these confrontations have been mortal (the double portrait of Isaac Babel and Laverenty Beria) and others, almost comical, Veronese testifying before the Inquisition in Venice. A number of subjects have been Russian which isn’t surprising since I am Moscow-born and bred. I have had a number of Russian itches that I have been unable to keep from scratching.

The painting of William Blake is the first of four moments from the life of the poet, also a sustained subject, and I take pains to paint each in an individual way. I am moved by the stark drama of the moment and these five years’ work have been painted under the aegis of theatre. I have a daughter who is a theatre artist and thoughts of drama are seldom far from my imagination. I have always been deeply influenced by music and literature, and by opera, their common child.

Quite often a subject will rattle around my mental drawer for some months or even years until I’m able to visualise it as a painting. I then go at it directly with little preparation. I paint the canvases one at a time, often undergoing excesses of tunnel-vision by the time I’ve finished one. They can take anywhere from three to eight weeks to complete because elements I felt I had securely in mind turn out to be fugitive or fragmentary or simply unpaintable and the thing has to be blundered through as much as to be shaped. With any painting that has a chance to be good, at some point all the preoccupations with the subject get swept away by the deep drive to find and refine the painting’s real form. Days may be spent tuning colour intervals or borders of shapes to reach the moment when the light of that particular painting suddenly breaks across the whole canvas.

I’ve written about the paintings of these five years as a body of work because, since the last of them, Infant self-portrait with a Zek, things have headed in a somewhat different direction. Less elegiac and objective, more lyrical and evanescent, my new work will be on view this coming October, 2006 at the Galerie Eric Devlin in Montreal.

If you wish to view more of Leopold Plotek’s work, go the: www.ccca.ca

Master of the genre of silence

Paolo Veronese before his inquisitors

Theodore Gericault cuts off his hair before embarking on the “Raft of the Medusa”

All images © Leopold Plotik