Surrounded by Inspiration

Writing By Vivian Manning-Schaffel

Artwork by Justin Negard

Some visual artists spend a lifetime cultivating an instantly identifiable style, investing years or decades building a body of work that expounds upon a designated thesis. Others revel in the liberation they feel when their tools are in hand, experimenting with whatever inspires them at that particular point in their evolution.

“My Garden,” acrylic on canvas.

Counting himself among the latter, Mount Kisco-based painter (and occasional sculptor) John Plunkett is happy to go where his muse invites him. His latest endeavor, a series of paintings titled “Pictures From My Garden,” features a bounty of large, vibrant, lyrical abstractions that loosely hearken back to the works of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee (Plunkett’s a fan). However, a deeper look into his full body of work reveals a series of varied explorations that veer stylistically from the bright, poetic, realistic land- and waterscapes inspired by his backyard and beyond to the dark doomscapes of wartime Vietnam—images he created while working toward his MFA at the elite Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

An unlikely beginning

Plunkett, who grew up in Levittown, Long Island, sort of stumbled into art school in 1971 after serving in the Vietnam War. Inspired by the comics he loved as a kid, Plunkett always doodled and drew, but he didn’t take his talent too seriously. “I liked dinosaurs,” Plunkett explains of his earliest inkling of artistic talent. “There was one of these action comics with dinosaurs and all kinds of stuff, and I just mimicked it. I realized I could draw anything.” There was also a bit of foreshadowing in his subject matter.

After graduating from high school, Plunkett didn’t want to go to college, so he opted to go to trade school for drafting—a place where he could wield a pen. Soon afterward, Plunkett got a job and was then drafted to Vietnam, which he describes as an “out-of-body experience.” Of his time there, he says, “An incident occurs, and it’s like you’re watching it in slow motion; it’s not like TV at all. It’s worse.” When he returned, he says, he wasn’t the same. However, Plunkett’s “soul searching” in the field inspired him to return to school, which coincidentally led him to the School of the Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City. “They were not certified yet as a college,” he recalls. “I walked in and met a woman who said, ‘I’ll give you a week to come back with a portfolio.’ So I came back in a week, and she got me into school.”

He embraced the experience, having studied under teachers like Harvey Dinnerstein and Gil Stone, a realist painter once compared to Édouard Vuillard. “I didn’t realize the influence he had on me until many years after graduation,” Plunkett recalls. “He always intimidated me. He’s such a good drawer, and I was so unskillful. It took years to get a handle on how to draw a good figure, how to draw things in general, and what drawing was really about. But that’s what made SVA a great place to learn.”

Art as therapy

In 1980, after graduating from SVA, Plunkett spent two years teaching graphic design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and around the same time, he and his wife, Lisa, decamped to Mount Kisco. She wanted to go to nursing school, so Plunkett found a job in design, and he continued painting in his spare time. But Plunkett wanted to learn more, and he and his wife discussed Plunkett’s desire to attend graduate school. So he began working on a collection for his portfolio: a colorful series of paintings that depicts what he describes as “creatures that look like toys,” invoking the whimsy of painter Max Ernst. The series of around 10 acrylic paintings on canvas and drawings led to his acceptance into RISD’s MFA graduate painting program, where he minored in sculpture.

When it came to subject matter, there was no corner of Plunkett’s mind he shied away from (a practice that still holds true today). During his time at RISD, Vietnam still occupied his thoughts, so as he further honed his drawing skills, he created a series of graphite works that documented his experience in the field during the war. “The series sort of fell out,” Plunkett says, describing his first attempt, saying it was “more blood and guts.” Yet, Plunkett says the graphic violence in his drawings didn’t fully communicate the experience. So he decided to scrap that round and create a body of work that used atmospheric imagery to convey the absurdity of war in a somewhat humorous way. “They started making sense when I eliminated humans, blood, and guts and focused on the experience,” he says. When Plunkett and his wife moved to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the work came together. The result was a remarkable, stark series that he says oozes a sense of foreboding and terror.

After graduating from RISD, Plunkett moved from Brooklyn to Mount Kisco to rejoin the workforce, eventually landing an art director position at Time Warner in the early 1980s; it’s a position he held for the greater part of 20 years. He loved that it afforded him the flexibility to see art and paint regularly. “The company didn’t require you to be there 24/7, so if nothing was happening, I would disappear and go to the galleries and museums,” he says. “I’d go three days a week, sometimes. No one asked where you were going. It was a very good job.” Following his tenure at Time Warner, Plunkett ventured into teaching, imparting his extensive drawing and painting skills to students at Westchester Community College from 2001 to 2010.

“Self portrait,” acrylic on canvas.

During his career at Time Warner, Plunkett stayed tethered to other Vietnam vets—especially those who made art—and connected with a group of fellow creatives from Chicago via a friend back in 1981. A woman who knew and worked with several Vietnam veterans advocated for and orchestrated their first art show, and the collective took to the road to display their work. “We stayed together for five years, traveling around the country doing group shows,” he says. “We were going like a rolling stone and picking up a lot of people.” At one point, in the 80s, they took over an abandoned Central Park Zoo aviary after a bout of flu killed the birds within. They worked together to build walls, install wooden floors and create a space to show their work. Eventually, in 1996, the group showed at what became The National Veterans Art Museum in Chicago, now called the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum.

Plunkett found these projects and collaborations helpful and healing. Yet, while the spectacle of their traveling show brought attention to what the artists had endured, Plunkett says the pageantry felt uncomfortable at times. “Politicians sometimes would bring out the wounded and have them standing on the side while you’re wandering through,” he explains. “They’d have tanks and planes going over us, and these veterans in wheelchairs were waiting on the side. We all had to go have a drink because it was just so overwhelming. Like, why would you do this? This is so weird.” Eventually, the group brought their work to Vietnam, which was poignant. “I felt like the circle was complete,” says Plunkett. “But I also felt that if there were more drawings to be drawn, I was fine with that.” The group eventually disbanded: “I guess it just felt like the right moment for it to end, and so it did,” he says.

John Plunkett.

Fast forward

“My Garden,” acrylic and graphite on canvas.

Plunkett’s latest work is a series of abstract canvases that blends the structural elements of mechanical drawing (he loves to work with graphite) with the freedom painting offers when his brush and the paint just do their thing. “It’s a funny process because it’s been years in the making,” he explains. “I love the pencil. I try not to be judgmental, so I just allow it to flow out.” The seeds of these larger paintings usually take root in the pages of a notebook, where Plunkett uses his graphite pencil to tentatively sketch and plot out what to do with each canvas. “Drawings could take a day or a couple of days,” he says. “I tear out a sheet, and I just start working. I’ll do 10 drawings and make it one painting.”

When it comes time to transfer his vision onto canvas, he evaluates where he’s come from and where he’s going with the work, using these drawings as a reference point. “The painting is based on the drawings, so I take the drawing aspect of it and use that to do the base drawing so they mimic one another,” Plunkett explains. Then, to add framework and precision, he grabs his graphite and plots out the linear aspect of the work, using custom tools he’s made himself. For example, in his latest collection, “Pictures From My Garden,” Plunkett created large French curves out of plexiglass for the strong, black graphite lines seen throughout the series. “I have a lot of rulers,” he says. “I have 4-foot and 7-foot tall rulers and some small rulers. I start with French curves and triangles, and then I do a series of lines.” He also uses a flexible French curve, which is a ruler that can bend in any shape.

Once he’s completed the lines, Plunkett treats them with a clear liquid called matte medium to “protect their sanctity” before dousing the rest of the untreated canvas with paint. He prefers acrylic paints for this series for their malleable quality, watering them down so the colors bleed and blend into one another, creating new forms. “For 80 percent of these paintings, I pick a color to use as a base and then play off of that primary color,” he says. “Whatever colors follow are all intuitive.” Color is Plunkett’s MO, as is also evident in the “Color Balance Rhythm” series he showed at the Chroma Fine Art Gallery in Katonah in 2024—which he describes as kind of an abstract meditation on suburbia involving colorful squares and rectangles evoking the work of painter Mark Rothko. “I’ve been studying color for a long time,” he explains. “I’m still doing a bunch of shapes, but I keep moving them in a new direction.”

When asked what a day in his studio is like, Plunkett describes an environment free of distractions that allows him to stay in conversation with the work. “I’m a person who prefers a quiet, distraction-free studio. I don’t play a lot of music,” he explains. “I have it on in the background, but it’s never loud. I don’t care what’s playing. It doesn’t really matter because everything gets blurred out. I can’t paint without having a conversation with the work: ‘What are you doing? What do you like? What don’t you like? Let’s destroy this and fix that.’”

Today, aside from Klee and Kandinsky, Plunkett admires the work of abstract and expressionist painters and sculptors like Philip Guston, Sean Scully, Elizabeth Murray, Frank Stella, and Clemente.

And if you’re wondering how he came up with the name for his latest exhibition, Plunkett says “Pictures From My Garden” was literal; he plucked the working title from his own backyard. “I just sit around and look out the window,” he says. “I love looking in the garden.” The marvels of the natural world serve as a constant source of inspiration to him. “When looking at a plant, I try to mimic a cycle of how it grows and evolves.”

His goal, Plunkett says, is to inspire viewers. “I’m not sure if I have a message as much as I want to have engaging work,” he explains. “I want people to think about it and hopefully be entertained by it. In this day and age, when everything is sounding so ugly, I want people to find them [his paintings] to be beautiful. The world is so weird, but it’s spectacular.”

John Plunkett’s “Pictures From My Garden” will be featured at Chroma Fine Art Gallery from June 15 to July 13

This article was published in the May/June 2025 edition of Connect to Northern Westchester.