Jon Plapp : some thoughts
Jon Plapp (1938-2006) took up painting in the mid 1960s when he was studying for a postgraduate degree in psychology at the University of Missouri in St Louis. Although he received some instruction in the university's art department, he was basically a self-taught painter. Over the following three decades and more, he pursued his profession of psychologist while painting in his spare time, yet few artists are as dedicated and consistent in their working habits as he was, and even fewer so genuinely disinterested - unconcerned about making art to please, to shine, to show, to sell. Plapp held firmly to his ideal of art for art's sake: painting was its own reward, the only reward that truly counted for him.
He was an abstract painter from the first to the last, and he became a serious, committed artist in a spirit of admiration and emulation. He was especially drawn to the colour-field paintings he saw at the David Mirvish gallery in Toronto in the late 1960s (Plapp and his partner Richard McMillan were part of a social scene around that gallery). At the time he was able to buy paintings from the Mirvish Gallery by Jules Olitski, Jack Bush and Larry Poons, which became, along with a few highly prized items of modernist furniture and an extraordinary, large-scaled Tony Tuckson drawing, Jon Plapp's household gods, his talismans. Plapp's artistic predilections tended to be Apollonian rather than Dionysian, to use the distinction made by the philosopher Friederich Nietzsche. Whereas Dionysian art is turbulent and impassioned, oscillating between agony and ecstasy, Apollonian art is balanced, serene and lucid. For the artists of Plapp's generation, American abstract expressionist painting was the prime example of a Dionysian aesthetic, whereas the younger generation of colour-field painters who emerged in the early 1960s was conspicuous for being "not like that".
They tended to shun the bohemian lifestyle, the intense individualism, the tinge of nihilism (or of neo-Dada), the high-voltage expressions of angst and alienation, the proud and pessimistic "unprofessionalism" and the flagrant roughness and messiness which, in a general sense, were characteristics associated with abstract expressionism. Temperamentally, generationally and in his philosophical outlook, Plapp was "not like that" - and this would have provided some additional, non-aesthetic reasons for colour-field painting's appeal to him, and for the beckoning opportunities he sensed that it offered to him. It was the kind of painting he could love, the kind of painting he could, perhaps, do, and where he would one day, perhaps, excel.
Nietzsche's distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac was co-opted by the American art critic Clement Greenberg in a famous essay that Plapp would certainly have known, where Greenberg called for "the development of a bland, large, balanced, Apollonian art . . . in which an intense detachment informs all. Only such an art, resting on rationality . . . can adequately answer contemporary life". This was a clarion call that Jon Plapp answered with his paintings.
They are paintings where the behaviour of colour is often the principal event. A tuned-in viewer rapidly realises that, presented in this way, Plapp's colour appeals to "the mind's ear": you are solicited not merely to look at it, but to peer into its density and sense its depths, to attune yourself to its vibrant reality, to listen to it, to feel it. Plapp was, of course, a trained psychologist, hence a professional listener and, by any standards, exceptionally acute and skilful at that - something his friends and colleagues will all attest. Plapp the colour-field painter and Plapp the man with a gift for listening were one and the same, and these aspects may be appreciated by analogy, the one through the other.
Being attuned to the energy of expression, sensing the tone, rhythms, patterns and pulsations, noting the speaking silences, noting alterations of emphasis and comportment, paying attention to the manifest sense of words while remaining alert to the implications behind them - these are basic human skills which are sometimes developed to the highest degree by artists as well as by psychologists and other kinds of readers and healers of the human spirit. It is interesting to note, apropos, Bruce James' remark about Plapp being "a child of his era [who] declines to understand this branch of humanist learning [psychology] as a discipline at all - more a liberation". One could paraphrase this by saying that Plapp regarded psychology as a means of "practicing his intuition" - the same explanation Matisse offered of his vocation as a painter.
Steadiness was a watchword for Jon Plapp. A few years after he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, he painted a whole exhibition's worth of hard-edge paintings which were full of immaculately straight lines, painted without recourse to masking-tape. One of the last times I saw him, he drove me to a friend's house an hour or more's distance from Sydney. He remarked that, although his hands were shaky, it hadn't affected his driving. Steadiness was important to him; he took great pride in it.
Placid, pacific, measured and Apollonian, it does not seem that Plapp's art was engaged with dramas of the Self nor any of the big existential questions -- not unless you are prepared to discount the quest for wholeness (which Plapp conducted in both the psychological and the aesthetic sphere), his reflection on "I and Thou" (the question of empathy and transference, as framed by Martin Buber and his commentators, which have such relevance and interest for painters), and his lifetime's meditation on freedom and happiness (which, as Plapp was well aware, can differ quite radically according to every individual's definition). His own quest for freedom and happiness gave substance and quality to his life, and provided the content and radiance of his art.
Terence Maloon, 2009