Something Small but Decidedly Good: Sara Suppan in one of 'Three Rooms' at Weinstein Hammons Gallery

Banner image: Sara Suppan, Silly/Crazy (detail), 2024. Oil on canvas, 40 x 32". Courtesy of the artist's website.

 

Sara Suppan is having fun. And more than that, she’s homing in on what’s ordinary, and gleaming delight from the everyday. By using technical skill to portray what’s simple — and sometimes simply goofy — Suppan paints portraits of objects you may have found in the depths of your closet, your bedroom, or your kitchen sometime in the last ten to twenty years. Paring down her practice with these vibrant, tangibly reminiscent still lifes, Suppan cements the iconography of her generation onto canvas. “There’s a contemporary wave of nostalgia I’m trying to ride”, she says. In a world quick to theorize and derive meaning from thoughts, art, and words, Suppan is making us reconsider the value of the memory-ridden material things.

Suppan borrows the exhibition's title, A Small, Good Thing, from Raymond Carver’s short story, which is about a couple whose child is hit by a car. In the next couple days while they’re at the hospital waiting for news from the doctor, they take turns stopping home to feed the dog, where they’re receiving calls about Scotty, their son. They think they’re being harassed or pranked until it comes forth that it is the baker trying to contact them about a cake order they made for the child's birthday, which was the day of the accident. The child ends up dying in the hospital, and the couple returns home in emotional ruin. Once the mother realizes it is the baker who has been calling them, they promptly drive to the bakery to curse out the baker. He begs for forgiveness, not knowing that their child was in a terrible accident, explaining how he only wanted them to pick up their cake and pay him for his efforts. Eventually the baker asks them to sit down. He gives them coffee, and offers them fresh buns from the oven, saying, “You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.” 

Carver is “skating the edge of this dark humor,” Suppan says of the tragic, hysteria-driven story. “I think that’s something I’m interested in with my paintings.” Raymond Carver tends to set his stories in the Midwest, “a plain American scene,” as Suppan calls it. And there is something very Midwest about Suppan’s paintings too, something born of this place and time, palpable to a life lived here.

“The things I choose to paint are from my life in some way. They’re not meant to be autobiographical, they’re supposed to be sort of universally recognizable in how specific they are.” Crafting still lifes from her perspective, the objects in Suppan’s paintings are things she’s crossed paths with — a beloved horse pen, a ceramic lemon found at a thrift store, a melting, drooping candle seen in the heat of summer at a church in France. “I collect little fragments throughout my day,” she says, meaning the notes hastily jotted and the photographs snapped on a whim often become the impetus for new paintings.

 

Top: Thumbs Up, 2024. Oil on canvas, 32 x 40". Bottom: Two Lemons, 2024. Oil on canvas over panel, 24 x 30". Both courtesy of the artist's website.

 

So why bring in play? Why focus on glee or pleasure when there’s surely so much seriousness to address? “It’s just something that motivates me to paint. I guess I find it endlessly good and fun to input a lot of painting skill, insofar as I can make something really lush and beautiful and real… I’m using a lot of the standard characteristics of a still life, inputting all of that tradition. But that’s not enough for me, like it wouldn’t be enough to just paint beautiful things realistically, that becomes boring to me. You develop painting skills and then at some point you’re like, what now? And I think to undercut, to slice through that with humor, makes the paintings more than just a still life.” Juxtaposing the potentially hundred hours spent on a painting with an instance of light-heartedness, and of undeniable nowness, generates some absurdity, which kind of adds to the joy, the joke, the good-humored jab to those of us who wonder if we’re “getting” the art.

In Two Lemons, there is a manufactured, ceramic lemon alongside a real lemon, and then there is a curved line drawn below, completing a smiley face. This is silly of course, and also a gesture recognizable as a facet of the cultural moment. Think emojis, think drawing on a dirty car window, think of that impulse: it’s something seemingly meaningless and insignificant but common, and momentarily amusing. Or with Dream a Horsey Dream, “I like the idea that you’d have a beautiful painting of a bad drawing,” she says. “The horse pen drawing a really bad horse — I just enjoy that… Good paintings of bad drawings. Or really elegant paintings of a silly straw — dumb, very contemporary, of-the-moment stuff.”

Suppan also enjoys making works that have an elaborate pattern, with one small detail breaking that pattern, providing “the punch” that completes the piece, or makes it worthwhile. Take Red Hot Sun in the Banana Galaxy for example, banana peels are splayed across a granite countertop, and then there’s that sticker, that darn Chiquita or Dole or in this case unbranded banana sticker clinging to the surface of the counter. The sticker that gets stuck on a shirt cuff or countertop or to the side of the trash can, never quite making it into the bag. It’s a small moment given the scale of the painting but it’s a relatable one, illustrating a minor inconvenience and mundane happening in modern day life. 

 

Top: Red Hot Sun in the Banana Galaxy, 2024. Oil on canvas, 50 x 40". Bottom: Dream a Horsey Dream, 2024. Oil on canvas over panel, 18 x 24". Both courtesy of the artist's website.

 

Suppan mentions having a “high tolerance for repetition” and not minding painting tiny detail after tiny detail, or floor tile after floor tile. “My mom grew up on a farm, and I think about that a lot — there’s something very close to the way that I work to what is needed for farming.” There’s a book of art criticism by Dave Hickey, Suppan recalls, called Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste. In it, Hickey posits that everyone is either a pirate or a farmer, depending on how they work day in and day out. “I’m a farmer,” says Suppan, “in that my way of working is slowly tilling the field. I have a routine, I usually get up and am in the studio by 9am. I work all day until I go to bed, then I do it again.” Working best in the light of consistency, Suppan’s practice unfolds steadily. “I feel like with every artist, the way that they work is evident in the paintings. Some people are really loose, or all the work is done ahead of time, and then when they execute the painting it’s really fast. Mine is really, really slow. It’s done slowly over time. I’ve been thinking a lot about midwesternism and farming as parallel to the work.” Through patient cultivation, she exercises traditional painting techniques whilst enjoying the fruits of her labor — the bright, spirited objects sprouting from oil on canvas.

“I like having light paintings now, it brings me a lot more joy,” she says. “Not that I’m trying to make straight up comedic paintings but I do love hearing comedians talk about the way that they work. Because comedians think surprisingly logically. And they’re always trying to build, and rehash, and build upon what they’d been doing and I think there’s something similar, at least with how I've been approaching painting, where I feel like if you watch the development of my work from even just the last two or three years I want to grow my technical skills as best I can, but the technical skill itself is in service of making something goofy and silly that connects with people.” 

Suppan’s hope is for each viewer to not only see her paintings, but glimpse a material shred from their own life. Maybe it’s the tie dye, cut up t-shirt straight out of junior year homecoming that jogs the memory (One Bright Day), or maybe the chintzy, plastic champagne glass raised at the new year (Y2000). Whichever object strikes the recollective chord, the moment of musing is fleeting, but grants enough time to tie the string of connection, or draw the mouth of a smile onto a human face this time, which is something small, but decidedly good. ◼︎ 

 

A Small, Good Thing installation detail, with work by Lorena Torres at right. Image courtesy of the gallery.

 

Three Rooms, which includes A Small, Good Thing, is on view at Weinstein Hammons Gallery through February 8. This is the second of three articles about the exhibitions on display. Follow the gallery on Instagram @weinsteinhammons.

To see more of Sara Suppans's work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram @sarasuppan.