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Solo Exhibits:
April, 2009: Nature Works III
April, 2006: Nature Works II
November, 2003: Nature Works I

Audio Recording: Plageman Keys (1.5mb mp3)
Joe's Link: Historic Saddlers Woods

Statement

Joe Plageman has been a menber of Highwire Artists, Inc. since 1991. He became a member following his retirement from a 30 year career teaching French, English and Latin in New Jersey high schools. He has been showing his work in the Delaware Valley since the early 1970's. At Highwire, Plageman has helped organize numerous group and two-person shows and often participated therein, not only as a painter, but also performance-painter, pianist-improviser and poet.

Nature Works I was first presented at Highwire Gallery in November 2003, as a large solo show. That show included performances with live music, dance, mime and poetry. For those performances, Plageman designed two chasuble-like costumes and designated certain exhibited art works as performance props.

Plageman began these Nature Works in Spring 2002. The series has evolved from simple bark rubbings on cloth and paper. From the start, Plageman planned to put aside brushes, easel, pencils and man-produced pigments and explore the pigments, tools and compositional patterns that nature has to offer in each of her seasons. Now loving trees, especially, and seeking an initial compositional base, he chose to begin by exploiting the wonderful patterns found in tree bark. And therein he discovered many wonderful compositional variations. This led him to introduce color into the rubbings. He gradually discovered the mine of colors in leaves, wild flowers, petals, stems and cores, and in tree marrow, fern, soil, mud, moss gathered in the areas adjacent to the rubbed trees of the forest, field, and river bank.

Nature Works II takes up from November 2003, when Plageman began to work on silk as well as cotton and Arches paper. He has made silk scarves and 20 foot long silk hangings and a group of triptychs starting from rubbings over various tree stumps. In 2005, he began a series of freestanding sculptural pieces based on bark patterns or the circumfrences of entire tree trunks. Within this second phase, below we see Plageman refining a piece on a linen cloth, with tree marrow in hand.

Since May, 2006, Plageman has been in a third phase of his nature-on-site explorations and will present a large portion of this recent work at Highwire Gallery in April, 2009. This show will include all aspects of his most recent work.

The last set of pictures for Nature Works III, presented below, includes India Ink leaf compositions on fine Far Eastern papers and several multi-colored pictures on French-made papers. In this last set, Plageman has overlaid site-specific sources of color with colors derived directly from fresh beet stems, orange-peppers, turmeric and mango powders, chili and soy sauce, rosepetals and the humble Asiatic Day Flower.