Seeing by Drawing: A Memorial Exhibition for Michael Plautz

Abstract

The Art of Michael Plautz.

Architects design buildings, of course, and Michael Plautz did that beautifully. But architects do something else: they see relationships and make connections that others overlook – and Michael Plautz did that beautifully as well, evident in the many paintings and drawings he created over his career. This work shows what intense, focused perception can produce and how art – like architecture – enables us to see relationships among things that might otherwise escape our eye. Through his art, Michael Plautz helped us view the world anew.

His favorite medium – watercolor – also says something about how man architects think. Just as architecture consists of voids in the solids of a building, watercolor starts with the white space of the paper and builds the solids of the painting around it. Watercolor, like architecture, teaches us to see what isn’t there as much as what is, to recognize absence as well as presence. And once we grasp that paradox, so apparent in Michael Plautz’s work, we never see the world quite the same again.

-Thomas Fisher College of Design