Ascending Artist: Devon Plopper
The young Spokane artist pushes the boundaries of detail and time
Her activity in the arts community has been sporadic over the past year or so, causing some to maybe wonder if she’s an artist in hiding.
Devon Plopper hasn’t had a solo show in Spokane since last spring, but the artist’s most recent series of ink-on-paper drawings took nearly a year to create. If you’ve seen them, you’d know why.
On the black painted wood floor of her 100-year-old Browne’s Addition apartment, the leggy 26-year-old kneels over a 3-by-3-foot sheet of paper. A tasteful mix of vintage and contemporary furniture fills the space, and the walls are mostly adorned with Plopper’s own art. Behind her, books on a set of four shelves are organized not by author or genre, but rather by the dominant spine color, in a cool-to-warm color spectrum.
Leaning forward on her knees, a wisp of bobbed, strawberry-blonde hair escapes from behind her ear and swings below her chin. Most of the paper is still blank — an early-stages work in progress — but is tentatively planned to be a larger version of the tiny, circle-stippled patterns from her latest series, shown at the Baby Bar last April.
“I don’t usually work like this,” she explains as a fine-point Staedtler pen in her hand barely moves over the paper beneath her. “Usually I get really comfy on the couch because I sit for hours at a time working on these.”
Any attempt to describe the tedium of the countless hours she’s invested into her most recent work seems futile until one has seen the minute detail of the untitled, nine-piece series.