Vera Kaplan grew up in New York City where she received an honors in art at the Music and Art High School, a B.A. at CUNY and an MLS at Columbia College. In the 1990s she returned to art school studying with Wolf Kahn at the National Academy of Design and at Hunter College with Georg Hoffman, Juan Sanchez, Emily Mason and Joanna Pousette D’Arte.

 

Kaplan has been painting and showing her work at various galleries in NYC, Austria, Japan, and in the Hudson Valley, where she resides with her husband and extended family. Her work is in private collections in the United States, Austria and Japan. Over 100 paintings by the artist are on long-term loan to the offices of 1010data, Inc. in New York City.

 

 Kaplan maintains a studio and resides in Rhinebeck with her husband, Joel Kaplan.

 

 Inspired by a color that wants seeing or the gesture of brush in hand moving on the canvas, Kaplan says her work is a dream that forms on the canvas or surface she is using. An atmosphere is building and the details will enter gradually. What shows up hints of what is coming next. It's like hiking a trail without markers, or hunting for treasure in faint moonlight.

 

“Listening to audio fiction keeps my surface thinking away from the painting process. For some this might be an impossible distraction, but for me it is a way of not impeding subliminal impulses from coming to the fore. In the act of painting while listening, my curiosity is being stimulated on two fronts at once: what is happening in this book? and what is happening on this canvas? I hope to convey a pleasurable sense of adventure to the public who see my work.”

 

What unites the diverse themes -- Kabbalistic anonymous beings, shamanic elements, gestural minimalism, and fauvist landscapes-- is the artist's use of high key color, strong pattern contrasts, layering and texture.