Making mundane moments memorable
Artist Sue Upton creates narratives for her lifelike human figures
“Don’t call them brooding and serious,” Sue Upton jokes.
We’re in the gallery at Art@231 with her paintings. One of them features a man serenading us with an accordion. He’s alone on a beach. Two dogs run away from him. Upton calls this work “Chick Magnet.”
Brooding and serious? Upton’s outstanding exhibition, Point of View, is anything but.
The Hamilton artist takes inspiration from the most mundane of moments and ends up with extraordinary narratives.
An art school graduate, she’s well known as a makeup and hair designer for stage and screen. She returned to painting a few years ago. She says she paints solely for the pleasure of it.
Upton’s style is starkly lifelike and focused on the human figure. Some of her humans appear only as heads and faces, thrusting us into a close relationship with the subject.
In “Winter,” for instance, a woman’s face and a bit of one shoulder take up almost all of the pictorial space.
We seem to be up close to her. But intimacy is discouraged by the woman’s covered face. And the eyes, the only part exposed, do not meet our gaze.
Yet Upton’s seeming woman of mystery was inspired by an ordinary event. She says she painted this during last winter’s cold spell. The woman is covered up simply because she is outside.
Two men star in “News at the Lakeshore.” Both wear black brimmed hats and black pants. But that’s all they have in common.
The man in the centre foreground is running with a gun in each hand, pointed at us. The second man, in the midground, is less active. He sits on a bench and reads a newspaper.
Apart from a pair of scrawny trees on the left, the setting offers strong horizontals that complement the rightward movement of the running man. Like the creator of a traditional narrative painting, Upton always makes us wonder what happened before this moment and what will happen next.
Upton came up with this narrative while stuck in traffic driving into Toronto.
“The idea for the painting became a juxtaposition of all the commuters being stuck sitting in a vacuum while all around us news was happening,” she says.
“I liked the idea of a guy sitting on a ridiculously placed bench with his head buried in a newspaper reading about the news, oblivious to the fact that it’s happening right in front of him, only to wind up reading about it in tomorrow’s paper.”
“Sunrise for Sia” captures a quieter moment. A woman — a friend of Upton’s called Sia — and a dog sit on a dock, their backs to us. The back view is rare for Upton.
The two companions gaze out over the sun-infused water to the distant shore.