Leopold Plotek: MacLaren Art Centre

Leopold Plotek Dept: Plotek was born in Moscow in 1948. He immigrated to Canada, by way of Warsaw, in 1960. He has lived in Montreal ever since. He is an artist and a teacher and he approaches both roles with old-fashioned seriousness, according to The Star. Plotek actually has two shows on at the MacLaren Arts Centre in Barrie until Feb. 18. And if Hue and Cry a selection of canvases from the past 10 years were there on its own, I d probably be recommending it. It s worth the trip to Barrie just to see a master colourist at work. But it is the second show, Workingman s Dead , that most captured my interest and you may want to take my suggestion to see Workingman s Dead: Lives of the Artists Paintings by Leopold Plotek and selections from the Sovfoto Archive with a grain of salt. And the grain is not because for most people going to the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie the trip will involve a car or GO train. The need for salt has to do with my liking Leopold Plotek. So: fair warning. It s a departure for me, I know. But this column is about somebody I know something about. But being serious is quite different from being ponderous as Plotek is the first to point out. He likes doing what he does, and he brings to his work the energy of his own enjoyments. He likes saxophonist Ben Webster, pianist Art Tatum, writer Samuel Johnson, composer Dmitri Shostakovich, hockey player Jean Beliveau, artists Honore Daumier, Eug ne Delacroix and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Corsican recipes, the Goon Show among the dozens of other enthusiasms that make him such excellent company. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.