About KaplanPrints

A journey through over sixty years of artistry and observation. The Stan Kaplan Art Archive invites you to dive deep into the tapestry of human experience depicted in Stan's diverse creations. Each piece reflects his commitment to craftsmanship and a connection to the world around us.

A Creative Legacy of Improvisation

My father was an artist who taught me creativity not through instruction, but through presence. He made woodcut prints and wood-carved murals, and when my sister and I were young, he would simply say: "Here are materials, make something." No prescriptions, no models to copy—the modeling was us observing him work. This served us well through life and influenced how I taught creative practice to dancers. From age three, I found my voice through improvisation at the piano.

Years later, during long summer conversations, we discovered we were speaking the same language—just in different media. My work with the improvisation ensemble Zasis reignited something in him, sparking new approaches to his sketching and artmaking. The doodles I scattered across school tests became inspiration for his teaching projects, which later evolved into my own three-phase creative process: 2-D originals transforming into 3-D variations, then into performative expressions. This also was distilled into “Drawing Conversations” which I used with my students to connect to their intuitive response system; and was how I communicated with my dad in the last years of his life when speaking became more difficult.

He taught me to hear visually. In high school, he'd show me several works in progress and ask which one “worked” and why. I learned to perceive rhythm and movement in woodcut prints the same way I heard them in music. This became essential when I began playing for dance classes and composing for dance—learning to hear movement.