Burnette G Pletan, World's Fastest Artist

Burnette G Pletan, in 1988

Burnette Pletan (playt-un) b.8/24/1910 - d.3/21/1991), the self-styled "Fastest Painter in the World".

Pletan started painting in 1932 after an artist visited his parent's farm, and Pletan decided he could be a painter himself. Self-taught, Pletan said (or possibly joked) that when he started painting he did not know that artists had special brushes, so he used regular house-painting brushes for his art. Whether a joke or not, that style of brush was the implement Pletan used the most, as demonstrated in two videos in the 1980s:

• Pletan on "65 and over"
• Pletan performing a very entertaining 'Bob-Ross' style how-to-paint

Family

Pletan was born in 1910 to Gunder and Selina Pletan in Wendell, Minnesota, the only son with three sisters: Gladys, Verna, and Judith. It does not appear that Pletan ever married.

Artistic Style

Identifying materials:

• Masonite 'canvas';
• Acrylic paints;
• In later works, day-glo spraypaint.

Pletan's style largely involves mixing several colors on a single wide-bristled paintbrush and drawing lines and smears on a Masonite backing, mixing the color as he goes. The thick brushstrokes and heavy application of paint makes for a exaggerated texture on his 'canvas', and the lack of working the paint (mostly due to the fast-drying acrylic paints) creates a fluid motion in his art. The style is amateurish compared to finer art, looking somewhat like a student of the Bob Ross school of art but painted with a 4" brush held in the fist. Still, Pletan's art has an certain "outsider art" appeal, as his style is immediately recognizeable, and his 'how to' video has taught imitators his craft.

Pletan's artwork relies on a few standard vignettes, usually a mountain lake, a snowy mountain pass, or a desert river. Nearly all include some sort of fauna, mostly deer but occasionally a person. By not expanding his repetoire of subjects, Pletan's art was a rote process with creative flairs on a smaller scale, such as the positioning of trees and deer. This makes his various paintings almost indistinguishable, except for close scrutiny of the small details.

By reducing brushstrokes to a minimum and sticking to familiar subjects, Pletan was able to produce paintings at a breakneck speed, from five to ten minutes for an average sized (around 16" x 24") painting. The size of Pletan's paintings depended only on the size of his canvases, which resulted in his paintings to be almost universally non-standard in size.

Value

Since I wrote an article about Pletan for Collector's Quest, I'm often asked what the value of a Pletan work is. Pletan claimed to have painted over 100,000 works in his sixty years, so his paintings are not overly-rare, but their reputation (sometimes deserved) as 'starving artist' paintings reduces their overall value.