Artist’s Statement
“See here how everything lead up to this day
And it’s just like any other day that’s ever been.”
Robert Hunter
The road that led me here from a lifetime in New York City was simple enough: I was in a relationship with a woman who came to Athens regularly to attend an annual dance party and one year, I tagged along. Though native to New York, either I or the city was changing and I found myself struggling ever more with depression. Athens offered me an alternative, somehow answering longings I’d harbored in my soul since childhood. Describing my early experiences here to my sister, she observed that it sounded like a Huck Finn existence. And indeed, at that time, I was renting a house on the West Side where I’d cross an old railroad track, a weed-infested vacant lot and then cut through a cemetery to get to the neighborhood grocery store.
I had started my career as a freelance artist working for Marvel, DC and other comic book companies, and continued to do so that for many years after I settled in Athens. But more and more, I found myself taking on commissions from local businesses, non-profits and soon found a home at the Athens News as their in-house political cartoonist, a relationship that lasted for more then two decades. These opportunities changed and broadened the work I do, and the walls surrounding you right now are festooned with the results.
And too, my sketchbooks filled with drawings of this rural landscape and its structures which, since I’ve lived here, themselves have changed drastically. Sometimes I’ve felt like Typhoid Mary in that so many places and vistas that inspired my love have vanished since I first drew them. All ways of life will eventually vanish, but perhaps we can keep a record, however we are called upon to do so, so that our descendants will have a chance to know and claim their own history before it disappears into the all-consuming jaws of Modernity. – S. Plunkett, Sept. 15th 2023
