"Painting is elusive. It's very difficult to verbalize, as you're putting into works something that speaks on its own," says the artist Patrick Ryan who adopted the penname of Henri Plisson for his impressionist paintings. "If you think in musical terms, painting is like jazz in that you skirt around the material or subject matter and orchestrate the work so that it can live on its own rather than just be a representational facsimile of something," he adds, eager to clarify his terms.
Seated in his California garden, reminiscent of Majorca, the island off the coast of Spain which he called home for several years, Plisson looks very much like the American he is. Born in Omaha, Nebraska in the late 1930's, educated at the University of Omaha and the University of Southern California where he obtained his MFA, he communicates in the lively yet exclusively confidential manner of a European at an outdoor cafe. Trying to explain his kind of impressionism, Plisson says "when you look at things you tend to focus on something. It's hard to focus on this whole scene at once. The rest is there, it's not defined and that which is not defined is what you paint."
Although Plisson paints varied subjects, landscapes, seascapes, still life and figurative, he insists that his paintings are beyond the recognizable subject. Plisson gets very animated as he gets closer to what he is attempting to define. "If a painting is too finished, too exact, it poses limitations on your ability to see it. The image freezes, limiting your illusion. Better to paint the effect of what is there so someone observing the canvas will see the effect of what you saw, not the subject matter you saw. In essence, what you are doing in impressionism is focusing on one thing, but you are painting another. I am painting a visual echo of what I see."
Henri Plisson's technique is intuitive, and together with his extraordinary sense of color, he creates vibrant and radiant images which have become even more intense through his feeling of warmth, and element Plisson incorporates into all of his compositions. Serigraphs, as well as oils, by this modern American Impressionist master are currently represented in many important corporate and private collections.
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