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Ellen Pliskin offers richly varied modernist interpretations of a traditional style of painting in her new exhibition, “Landscapes,” running through June 19 at the Good News Cafe and Gallery.
Pliskin, a New York City native who spends her summers at her residence and studio in Cheshire, presents selections in watercolor and mixed media from an extensive body of works that have been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad over more than two decades. She explained in her artist statement that her works “reflect a convergence of traditional landscape painting and modernist pictorial exploration.”
“I am a painter who uses layers of color to suggest real objects and places,” Pliskin said. “I wish to convey a sense of space and flowing movement in the landscape. The paintings are composed of areas of color that flow into each other and flood the entire sheet of paper. I want the viewer to see the translucent aspect of the work, through to the pencil work underneath down to the texture of the paper.”
Pliskin has pursued a dual career as a painter and as an art educator, maintaining a home in Cheshire while keeping close ties to the New York arts community as a member of the New York Artists Circle. She earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at Hunter College and a master’s degree in special education at Fordham University in 1981. Her educational experience has included service on the faculty of the Fordham Graduate School of Education and as an art specialist and consultant to the Department of Special Education of the New York Board of Education.
Her artistic work has been featured in five solo exhibitions and more than 50 group shows over the past 21 years in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, New Mexico and Oregon. During 2005, she staged a one-person show at the Gilbert Gallery at Miss Porters School in Farmington, and participated in group shows at the Spike Gallery in Chelsea, N.Y., Guild Hall in East Hampton, N.Y., and Artful Expressions Gallery in Seaside, Ore.
Her most unusual venues for exhibition have been the U.S. embassies in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, and Libreville, Gabon, where selections from her landscape works have been featured prominently for public viewing. Loans of her works were arranged under the Art in Embassies Program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. Her paintings are also featured in many private collections including the Pfizer Corporation, the Connecticut Savings Bank, the Health Insurance Plan of Greater New York, the Hospital for Special Care in New Britain, and the Stand Up for Kids Foundation in Boston.
The subjects of her landscape works range from the desert regions of the American Southwest and the Mediterranean island of Crete to rural Connecticut. Pliskin has worked extensively in watercolor, and considers this medium well suited to her artistic vision.
“For me, watercolor is a graphic medium where you can see the process,” she said. “The process becomes the subject. The painting is as much about this process as the things that are depicted. Watercolor really allows me to get in touch with the kinetic aspect of seeing and marking, which in turn culminates in a richer landscape vision.”
In a review of a previous Pliskin exhibition, Waterbury Republican-American associate features editor Tracey O’Shaughnessy observed that the artist’s paintings of “creates some beautiful, kinetic images” in her vibrant landscape watercolors.
“She layers colors and forms along an often horizontal plane, giving her contours a rich, energetic texture,” O’Shaughnessy wrote. “Pliskin is unafraid to mix apparently dissonant colors on top of one another, and many of her works celebrate the hard, defined edge.”
The work shown on this page is "Portal," a watercolor painting by Ms. Pliskin.
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