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Maris Platais, a native of Latvia, has lived in New England since 1949. He is a graduate of Tufts University and the Boston Museum School. After serving for four years in the United States Marine Corps with both the Atlantic and Pacific fleets, he worked as an advertising artist, corporate and freelance, while concurrently teaching drawing at the Museum of Fine Arts. Currently, he teaches painting and drawing at the Lexington Painters Guild in Lexington, MA and the Concord Art Association in Concord, MA.
Since 1982, he has devoted his full time to the fine arts. He lectures, demonstrates and conducts workshops to art associations throughout the northeast. He has served as juror for many organizations, including the New England Water Color Society and the Guild of Boston Artists.
Maris has had many one-man exhibitions, including seven at the Guild of Boston Artists and three at the Latvian Heritage Foundation. His work has been shown nationally and internationally and has won four Awards of excellence in the Mystic International. His work was also included in the "Top 100" 11 times in the ARTS for the Parks competition in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In 1996,1997, and 1999 he received Honors awards in graphics from the Academic Artists Association in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 2001 he received the John Stobart Boston Harbor award and in 2005 the Alden Bryant Award, Guild of Boston Artists. In 2006, Latvian television did a half hour documentary on Platais as an American artist of Latvian decent. In August 2008, his work was included in a permanent collection in a Latvian Art Museum, Valmiera, Latvia. In 2009, he received a grant from the Wilderness Workshop as artist-in-residence in Aspen, Colorado. His work has been exhibited at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Worcester Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, and in many private galleries from Maine to San Francisco.
Platais is a member of the Guild of Boston Artists, the Academic Artists Association, signature member of the American Society of Marine Artists and the Concord Art Association, where he served as president. His work is in many corporate and private collections both in the United States and abroad including Avery Dennison Corporation, Ocean Spray Cranberry, The United States Navy, and Welch's Foods. It has been featured several times in the centerfold and cover of Yankee Magazine and the Boston Globe. His work also appears in "Arts for the Parks,'' North Light Publishing, and Bound for Blue Water, published by J. R. Jinishian, Greenwich Workshop.
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