Poetry, Painting & Prints

WINDOWS
the air straightened on the wall
up and down
color
the blue stiffened clouds
pull the wind across
the widows
you make to see
Sarah Plimpton

Today, half way through the second decade of the 21^st Century, New York City is considered to be the center of the Art World. But it has not always been so. Prior to the Abstract Expressionists, who some 60 odd years ago claimed that honor for the Big Apple, the French Capital of Paris held the mantle. And even today there are many who find their inspiration there.

One such is the American poet, artist and novelist Sarah Plimpton who for some twenty years luxuriated in older European capital.

As the American author Edmund White recounts in his book Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris Plimpton replied to his expressed intention to spend a year in Paris “I thought the same thing. Just one year. Now it’s nineteen years later. It’s really the land of lotus eaters here.”

It was in the early 1960’s that Plimpton journeyed to the city of lights and it was there that she embarked upon her artistic career.

As she explained to Central Booking, the New York Artist’s Book Gallery “When I was in my 20s I moved to Paris and stayed there for 20 years. Although I majored in Biology and went to Medical School for three years, in Paris I made a 180-degree change and started to paint and to write.”

Now based in New York Plimpton continues to write and publish her poetry, make paintings and prints and publish her artist’s books which often combine both her written and visual works.

In 2013 Hyperallergic’s Mary Ann Caws wrote about Plimpton’s exhibition Doubling Back: Sarah Plimpton on the Page and the Wall “Nothing in the Plimpton vision or rendering is localized, nothing is made too much of nor stressed: These are poems and shapes of and about understatement.”

Plimpton’s current exhibition Black Light: New Works is on show at New York’s June Kelly Gallery until the 9^th of February.