Poetry of Place:
The Images of Tupper Saussy
– by Budd Harris Bishop, Director Emeritus,
Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida
Tupper Saussy’s artfully manipulated photographic images conjure exotic locales and dreamy environments.
Chosen from glimpses of enviable travel, the scenes and subjects he presents draw one into a world of delicately washed color, unexpected pattern, and unique viewpoint.
Saussy has always been iconoclastic – in his writings, his music, and now in visual art. He likes to upend expectations...
I particularly respond to the way he subverts straightforward landscape images by confronting ordinariness with lyricism. In his rendition of a distant mountain view disfigured by the intrusion of utility poles and telephone lines [view image], he manages, by centering the offenders and choosing elegiac color, to convert the view into something that recalls Japanese tributes to Mt. Fuji —now transposed to modern California.
Saussy’s world travels have yielded some fine, rare subjects for his work, but it is often the mundane and familiar that he somehow elevates through his technique. A simple pattern of architectural shadows, a potted plant... or the plumbing fixtures in a men’s room: these all acquire surprising visual grandeur in his treatments
The key to his success is not in his material techniques, but in his sharp ability to see the singularity of his images, to visualize fresh insights, and to compose these ideas in revealing ways:
A case in point would be Garden Shop, the view in Charleston taken in a plant nursery sales area, where ordinary concrete pots and cast garden statuary take on the allure of a storeroom in an ancient Greek museum.
Garden Shop: Charleston
This alchemy is the result of an acute vision, aided by rock-sure compositional choices, and enhanced by choices of color. The cycle of effect is completed with the viewer’s recognition of the true subject, not the illusion.
The viewer shares in the outcomes of Saussy’s work. He is not afraid of irony or outright humor in some of his work (see the Six of one, half-dozen of the other series; the “paper bag” series), and part of the pleasure of the work is “getting it.”
Six of One, Half Dozen of the Other
Many viewers of contemporary art are (rightfully) annoyed at what they perceive to be encoded—or even dead secret—meanings in art work that are closed to them. Saussy includes the viewer in his ideas without condescension.
If there can be one descriptive phrase to connect Saussy’s best works, it would be “poetry of place.”
The Persistence of Civility
In his Charleston images; in some of the views of Asian temples, Omani habitudes, Mediterranean streets; and in his tropical foliage series, there is a clear poetic evocation of the essential nature of the place—a visual reduction to its very character—that connects with the viewer.
The “paper bag” series deserves special attention, because the artist has returned to this idea over decades, and because it gives him an outlet for his witty wordplay. Envisioning the ordinary brown paper bag as the central player in a series of dramatic (or funny) situations—as traps, as containers, as masks, as follies—leads the viewer into realms of imagination, and into recognition that art and life rather unnervingly imitate each other.
