JOE PLASKETT

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"Still Life with Chinese Lanterns"

Joe Plaskett, "Still Life with Chinese Lanterns," 2005, oil on canvas, 28" x 29.5".

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"Joe Plaskett"

Joe Plaskett.

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"Red and White Flowers"

Joe Plaskett, "Red and White Flowers," 2006, pastel on paper, 21.5" x 29.5".

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"Still Life with Chinese Lanterns"

Joe Plaskett, "Still Life with Chinese Lanterns," 2005, oil on canvas, 28" x 29.5".

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"Still Life on Yellow"

Joe Plaskett, "Still Life on Yellow," 2005, oil on canvas, 28" x 36".

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JOE PLASKETT

By Brian Brennan

Today, as he approaches his ninth decade, Plaskett is still exploring his potential as a painter. He makes his pictures at his inherited country home in Suffolk, England, where the view from every window offers him glimpses of foliage, trees, and flowers that he incorporates into his landscapes and still lifes. An expatriate for fifty years, Plaskett has found his artistic inspiration in England and Paris while finding steady support and a regular market for his work in his native Canada. “I owe my livelihood to the country I come from and to its enlightened citizens,” he says.

Plaskett is not a well-known Canadian artist. He does not have the kind of national standing that painters such as Jack Shadbolt, Harold Town, and Alex Colville command. His only significant honour has been the Order of Canada awarded in 2001 when he was 83. The critics have largely ignored him. Yet, as the author George Woodcock noted in the foreword to Plaskett’s autobiography, Plaskett remains an important Canadian artist whose works are found in many private and public collections across the country: “Many people passionately collect his works for the joy in life they project, and privately value them.”

Born in New Westminster, BC, on July 12, 1918, the son of an Anglican clergyman, Plaskett was a late bloomer as an artist. In high school he excelled at subjects that pointed him toward the University of British Columbia, where no art was taught. He took an honours degree in history, taught school for six years, and indulged what he called a “puerile enthusiasm for art and an amateurish practice of it” by taking evening life classes at the Vancouver School of Art. He experimented with Impressionism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Abstraction, and said afterwards that his art teachers would not have seen any promise in what he produced.

In the summer of 1945, when he was twenty-seven, Plaskett decided to get serious about his art. He spent six weeks at the Banff School of Fine Arts studying painting with Group of Seven member A.Y. Jackson, who characterized Plaskett as “one of our coming artists, if he has the opportunity to work.” The following year, Plaskett won an Emily Carr scholarship — a $1,000 prize — after being recommended by Group of Seven leader Lawren Harris. This allowed him to spend five months at San Francisco’s California School of Fine Art and a further nine months in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts, studying with noted abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann who “transformed me from an experimental dilettante into a professional painter.” Hofmann also transformed Plaskett from an abstract artist into a figurative painter. “This may seem a paradox, since Hofmann was an evangelist of abstraction,” said Plaskett. “But it is explained by his insistence that his pupils work from the live model.”

Plaskett became principal of the Winnipeg School of Art in 1947. The money he saved from that job, and from his summers teaching in Banff, allowed him to leave North America in 1949 and live in Paris. He would return to Canada in the ensuing years to teach at the Vancouver School of Art and at the University of Saskatchewan’s summer workshops in Emma Lake, Saskatchewan. But by 1957 Plaskett was working as a full-time painter in Paris, free from all teaching duties and exhibiting and selling his work at private galleries in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal. 

Plaskett’s home in Paris was a sprawling four-storey fifteenth-century house in the ancient Marais quartier that he purchased with a fellow Canadian painter, David Hill, who had also renounced Modernism to focus on figurative and objective art. There, Plaskett painted the evocative still lifes in pastels and oils that would earn him comparisons to such French still-life painters as Bonnard and Matisse. “Romanticized impressionism,” is how Vancouver Sun art critic Michael Scott described Plaskett’s art. Many of his paintings depicted the leftovers of memorable meals and bottles of wine shared at home with friends; a genre that Plaskett mischievously dubbed “tablescapes.” 

In 1973, Plaskett inherited the cottage in Suffolk from an old family friend, an Anglican clergyman named Fane Edge, whom he had been visiting annually in England for 15 years. Plaskett briefly considered selling the cottage to buy a secondary residence in France. “But I am unable to part with anything that has become a part of me.” Instead, he made it his spring and summer home, while continuing to spend his autumns and winters in Paris. He added a third home to his collection when he inherited a house in New Westminster that had belonged to his former piano teacher, Rita Thomas. Plaskett loaned that house to a nephew with the stipulation that he could use it as a pied-à-terre whenever he returned to Canada for a visit.

Plaskett began to lose his hearing in his seventies, and from then on he spent more and more time at his home in Suffolk, cultivating solitude. “A deaf man finds less and less pleasure in society,” he explained. He converted his Paris home into a trust that would enable young Canadian visual artists to pursue their studies overseas when the property was sold after his death. Proceeds from the sale would fund a series of annual scholarships. But when fire partially destroyed the upper storey of the home in 2002, he decided to sell the property immediately “and start the award in my lifetime.” The first $25,000 award was given to Victoria painter Mark Neufeld in 2004, and a proud Plaskett was on hand to make the presentation at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. “It is a salute to the great art of painting, a salute to young people from an old man, and a salute to my country,” he said.

At the time he started to lose his hearing, Plaskett surprised many by eliminating some of the figurative elements from his painting and replacing them with the abstract elements he had experimented with during his earliest years as an artist. “Plaskett is once again burning white hot with modernist zeal,” reported Michael Scott in the Vancouver Sun. Plaskett explained that he was “desperate for renewal” after years of experimenting with the “magical but evanescent effects of light on objects in interior space.” 

“I have said as much as I need to say in that language,” he said. “I lingered too long, spellbound.” At the same time, he left the door open to a possible return to predominantly figurative painting in the future. “Nothing done or said is ever the last word,” Plaskett wrote in his autobiography. “That is the delight of being an artist — the lure of the unimaginable and with it the possible realization of vision.”

Today, with exhibitions of his latest work scheduled to run concurrently September 9 to 23, 2006, at the Bau-Xi galleries in Vancouver and Toronto that have represented him regularly since the 1970s, Plaskett is still opening up a whole new world of artistic renewal for himself. In an artist’s statement prepared for the Vancouver and Toronto exhibitions, he writes that the 40 new canvases and pastels on display — all completed during the past two years — represent both an involvement with new subject matter and a continuing exploration into the potentials of picture making.

“Much of my work in the past has been inspired by whatever my eye chanced to fall on in the spaces where I work — the disarray on a table after a meal, or sunlight illuminating the furnishings of interior space, or plants, flowers, and fruits that accumulate in pots, vases, and bowls — all these in innumerable juxtapositions,” he writes. “But the new work exhibited here has often concentrated on objects isolated from the former abundance of forms.” Plaskett will also open an exhibition of older paintings at Victoria's Winchester Galleries September 10 to October 7.

Plaskett writes that whenever he switched to a new colour while making these paintings, he left a rim of the first colour on the canvas as a way of marrying form to background space and generating a “breathing pulsation hinting at ambiguity.” He adds that he plans to develop this technique even further in future work “as long as I take note of what Picasso said: ‘You can try anything in painting. You even have a right to. Provided you never do it again.’” Plaskett says that while he may find himself doing “it” again in the future — “Picasso constantly did until he exhausted the invention” — he will try to ensure that each new use of the colouring technique “will not become a formula but remain an original creation.” That way, as Plaskett wrote in the final chapter of his autobiography, he will continue to grow and develop, always looking forward, and never resting on his laurels: “The painter lives for the moment, for the intensity of the second during which a blinding light illuminates.”

Joseph Plaskett’s autobiography, "A Speaking Likeness", is published in Vancouver by Ronsdale Press. www.ronsdalepress.com