"Diagonal Fish on Map" Painting

Born and raised in New England, Plastridge moved back to the United States after 24 years in Asia; Tokyo (2000-2008); Hong Kong (2009-2018); Singapore (2019-2024). She paints portraits of her immediate family, particularly her children, and preferably from life. She also has a series of on-going self-portraits in various media. She aims to create works that convey a sense of poetry of the everyday. Plastridge offers portrait commissions in graphite on paper and oil on canvas. She writes, "sitting for a portrait is a process. It is an active exchange between sitter and artist; a collaboration." In January 2019, Allison moved with her family to Singapore where she has developed a more personal and intuitive manner of working in “abstract” watercolors and ‘visual poems.”

Plastridge received her diploma in painting from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (1994) and her B.A. with Honors from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts (1987). Plastridge was awarded the Harriet Hale Wooley Scholarship from the Fondation des Etats-Unis in Paris (1992) and fourth prize in the Talens Figurative Painting Competition in Paris (1992). Her work was also selected as part of the Paul-Louis Weiller Portrait Prize Competition and the Pierre David-Weil Drawing Prize Competition, both at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1991). Plastridge's work has been exhibited and is held in private collections in Paris, New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.

Allison Plastridge writes, "my paintings come from a reverence for and a curiosity about the visual world and about the past. I make paintings about fleeting moments, when the present slips into the past. I come to each work differently, sometimes by looking at my collection of old maps and newspapers, tearing a page and gluing it down as collage. I take inspiration from wandering through the wet markets of the cities in which I live to see if a particular fish or fruit catches my attention, the iridescent skin or glistening eye; an unusual color, shape or texture. I immediately imagine such an image in dialogue with the torn page of text and, very spontaneously, I begin to paint. I work quickly to capture this temporality, allowing bare parts of the canvas or parts of the fish unpainted. The canvases are often small and intimate in scale and dimension. In my work, I strive for a more 'abstract notion' of the fish rather than a literal translation of the visual."