Painter wins new award

by Alexandra Gill

Victoria painter Mark Neufeld is off to Berlin after winning the inaugural $25,000 Joe Plaskett Foundation Award, on of the larges visual-arts awards in Canada.

The new annual prize, eligible to students across Canada who are studying for their master of fine arts, or have attained an MFA this year, is designed to support a one-year residence in Europe.
Most notable about the award – besides its rich purse – is that it is only available to painters.  When the first biennial $50,000 Sobey Art Award was announced two years ago, not one of the five finalists were painters.

“I suppose painting has been somewhat eclipsed in the contemporary art world, maybe more so in Canada than other places,” says Neufeld, before receiving the award yesterday at the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in Vancouver.

Neufeld, 32, a student in the master of fine arts program at University of Victoria and graduate of Emily Carr, plans to go to Berlin after his graduation this spring to study alongside a new generation of German artists that include Thomas Scheibitz and Franz Ackerman.

The winner’s brightly animated, large-scale paintings, currently on display at Emily Carr’s Concourse Gallery, depict a series of chaotic rooms culled from film, interior-design magazines and memory, that simultaneously embrace order and destruction to give the viewer a sense of dislocation and vertigo.
“The applicants showed a high level of achievement and even more of potential, but Mark’s work stood clearly out from the rest in its control – I’d even say mastery – of many of the complexities of the painter’s art,” Plaskett said of the jury’s decision.

The 86-year-old benefactor was one of the three jurors, that included Sherrard Grauer and Robert Young.  He does not intend to serve on future juries, “This is a way of paying my dues,” says Plaskett, the BC-born artist, who won the first Emily Carr scholarship in 1946, after being nominated by Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson.

“I owe almost all of my good fortune to Canada,” says Plaskett, who lived in Paris from 1949 to 2001, when he moved to Suffolk, England.

Although originally an abstract expressionist, Plaskett embraced figurative painting after studying at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco with Hans Hoffmann in New York and the Slade in London.  An exhibition of his new oil paintings will run concurrently at the Bau-Xi Gallery in Toronto and Vancouver from Sept. 11 to 22.

“I have created this award in emulation of what Emily Carr did for me,” says Plaskett.

View Article