Remembering Carl Plansky (1951-2009)

Carl Plansky, artist and founder of Williamsburg Artist Materials, suffered a fatal heart attack on Saturday, Oct. 10. Carl made big, energetic paintings full of color and bravado and was known as a generous teacher who spoke honestly but with compassion, kindness, and humor.

I met Carl when I was a student at the New York Studio School last year. Having studied at the school in the 1970s, he visited frequently as a guest artist for teachers Bill Jensen and Margrit Lewczuk. Carl was a big man who boiled over with energy and focus. When he entered my studio, his beard led his body like the iron plates old trains had on their engines to clear the tracks. I could feel the energy change. He would stalk the wall where my work hung and give my paintings long, squinty, cockeyed glares. He thought before talking.

The first of his works I saw in person were much-larger-than-life flower paintings at Fischbach Gallery. He put down paint with ferocious affection. His surfaces look like the moon, building up to thick, craggy mountains of pigment and pockmarked with thin, perfect plains of washes. He was in love with the textures and colors of oil painting and would frequently talk about color theory.

Carl’s work is currently showing at the New York Studio School Gallery. Only when I saw this show did I understand something he once told me.

He looked at my work and said "You're an image maker. But that's OK, you can work with that." I asked for an explanation and he told me how it really messed him up when he first moved to New York and the first shows he saw were by Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon. "They're image makers," he said. I vaguely understood that he was talking about a certain iconographic approach to painting. These are artists who paint images as symbols, not as surprising and unpredictable as actual images of reality are. "It took me a long time to get over that," he said.

In Carl's current show, "Sacred Monsters: Carl Plansky's Divas," he paints opera divas, models who look like divas, and himself dressed as various divas. The subjects are powerful and iconic. But Carl's approach isn't like Warhol's or Bacon's; it's closer to Joan Mitchell's or Claude Monet's. He doesn't lean on the subject itself to convey power. These aren't illustrations of something outside the canvas. They're powerful because of Carl's painting. Carl Plansky's touch and material and his body's presence are what these paintings are about--a painter's mind made physical, roaming the canvas and building a rhythm until the paintings sing. For Carl, art did not illustrate life. His art was made of it.

Speaking of Warhol, Carl once told me about being on a discussion panel where a famous artist took a knowing swipe at painters who "paint pretty flowers," knowing full well that Carl was among them. Carl confronted the artist and asked if he liked Warhol's coolly ironic and distant flower paintings, which are based on someone else's photo of flowers. The famous artist replied that of course he liked them. So Carl publicly asked him, "So your problem isn't that I paint pretty flowers, it's that I actually mean it?"

That was Carl. He was fearless and advocated for sincerity and directness. Art mattered to him. Once, after he came back from North Carolina, I asked him how he liked it. He smiled and said in his thick Baltimore accent that he liked it "because people actually care about paintings down there. It's not an investment." He could be playful and blunt and very funny.

When my wife was pregnant, and I was full of anxiety about becoming a father, I began to work on a painting of a dark forest with a strange blue light glowing on gnarled trees, the limbs of which seemed to reach for the light. I couldn't decide if the light was scary or mysterious or miraculous. I couldn't separate the ideas behind the painting from the actual physical thing. At that point, Carl came in to critique our work. I set up my painting and waited for Carl's response. He crossed his arms. He cocked his head. He squinted and took a step back. He was silent for a long time. I began talking about feeling the need to have my paintings be about my life and be personally meaningful. He pursed his lips and said something devastating: "It's a little Disney, isn't it?"

He was right. We talked about the specifics of colors and line. I was nervously trying to paint in a new way, and he'd hit right on my problem. He thought I was borrowing emotion from somewhere else. I protested that my painting was more like German expressionism. He told me to go look at real trees, because mine were based on cartoon ideas of the real thing.

"You have to trust yourself," Carl said. "Trust your mark." That mark is the painter's connection to reality, and it's what's left behind on the canvas. But painters who are teachers leave their mark with students, too, and I am fortunate to have more than just Carl Plansky's paintings to remember him.

A memorial service will be held for Carl Plansky at the New York Studio School (8 W. 8th Street, New York City) on Sunday, Oct. 18 at 3 p.m.

Carl Plansky, right, in his studio with his partner Chris Browne in 2007 (Photo: Jessica Cheung)