A Spotlight on the Drawings and Paintings of Jane Sugar

A Spotlight on the Drawings and Paintings of Jane Sugar, by Alex Russell

Tumblr can be a good place for artists or those deeply involved with or fascinated in art. There are countless photos of work by renowned and well-known artists, ranging from Vincent van Gogh to Mark Rothko (there is even a blog dedicated solely to discussing and showcasing Rothko’s work, updated, as its title suggests, every day). 

There are countless contemporary, original creators, too. I had the fabulous luck of stumbling across one of these artists – an experienced, profoundly diverse, and dedicated New York City-based creator named Jane Sugar.

Sugar’s blog displays almost instantly the sheer variety of media with which she creates. From work done in colored pencil on paper, to magnetic pieces done in ink, she adeptly constructs visuals both intriguing and engrossing, prompting a closer look. 

Her representational pieces, depicting people, places, or animals, can sometimes venture into surrealistic moments, frozen in time – or tender, wholesome snapshots underscored with patience and warmth. What might have been a specific place on Earth is distilled into soft shades of pink and violet; the natural world, even in a piece called “City Picnic,” is never far away.

Like any great artist, Sugar also has a sense of humor; her more whimsical pieces are simple, straightforward samples of jocularity, with the short, implied distance of an inside joke between two close friends. 

“Tree Play,” a vertical piece done in ink and colored pencil on paper, is a visceral example of bold strokes and thick, dark spaces. There is a sense of impermanence to the wispy nature of many of the strokes and linework, almost reminiscent of a half-memory or dream. This visual and textural denial of concrete objectivity works like a question, a space in which to ponder and think. Something solid, a piece of art that works as a self-sufficient answer, will almost never be as interesting. 

Sugar is capable of uncovering great nuance in darker colors. Her series “Nighttime Sky” consists of various, square-shaped pockets of the night sky. One segment, “Stars in the Night Sky,” evokes shades of van Gogh – except this “starry night” does not rely on swirls and vibrant, emotive streaks. It instead embraces the thick, inky, shadowy depths of a dark sky, creating a unified, balanced image. The delicate dollops of pale starlight and blue, lacelike clouds tamper off the otherwise enveloping night.

This untitled square, again from the “Nighttime Sky” series, is almost entirely dark and, without the added titular context, may as well be a purely abstract work. Still, there is something entirely immediate in the piece. The gouache – sometimes tenderly applied, at times layered on thick – hints at a resounding emotional weight; a nameless, but powerful, feeling not unlike that special feeling one gets looking up at the sky at night. 

It is clear that Sugar takes from life to create her art – work that sometimes feels like a re-contextualization of something deeply intimate, or a soft, introspective reflection on something personal and real. Many of her scenes depicting people or specific places – like “Central Park” – seem to combine real, physical “object matter” – to borrow a phrase from Barnett Newman – with her own subjective impressions, adding up to something like a half-remembered dream. 

She can also completely surprise the viewer with vivid, organic, completely abstract works – expressionist images that speak volumes, without ever raising their voice; pictures that have their own emphatic, neutral nature.

This untitled piece is especially resonant – symbols that appear to be eyes or mouths are both clear and translucent, moving in and out of the overall mass of swirling, bubbling, flowing colors. No one segment overpowers any other in the piece, intimating a sense of peace and calm, despite the lack of title or any recognizable elements.

Certain work, built off of an actual, real world basis, like “Seascape,” retains the unpredictable, expressive, and wonderfully quizzical nature of an abstract action painting. Parts of it levitate, fading in and out of this existence; others swirl and glide and retain their autonomy in a constantly fluctuating visage. 

Sugar is the type of artist whose work I adored from the first go. Her recurring overabundance of visual elements, whether they are abstract shapes and lines, or specific elements like people, trees, or household objects, never feel like clutter or a busy series of afterthoughts. In fact, she handles business superbly well, turning something that might otherwise have felt hectic into a kind of rhythmic experience – almost like music. 

Having touched on all the things she includes in her pieces, it’s important to mention another one of her skills – knowing when to employ empty space. The understated, subtly heartbreaking “Under a Field” is that kind of painting, placing a seemingly blank human shape near the center of the canvas, between the deep, sprawling, empty blue sky and the subterranean darkness in the bottom half of the image. Although the body seems stuck “under” the world, it’s a transcendent, moving picture, perhaps speaking to the double-sided nature of isolation – it can be peaceful, or wholly stultifying. 

In any case, the striking, equally colorful and dark absence in “Under a Field” is another one of those opportunities for a viewer to pause, breathe, and coexist with a truly special piece of art. 

* * * 

If you find an artist whose work amazes and inspires you, to whatever degree, as you scroll through social media, I encourage you to reach out to this person and share a bit about what in their output spoke to you. Art made by everyday people sometimes gets relegated to unjustly put-down, over-simplified words like “hobby,” avoiding the massive inner value and strength of putting pencil to paper and sharing it with the world. 

Her blog, A Mock Turtleneck, can be found at amockturtleneck.tumblr.com.

Alex Russell earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from George Mason University and now works in the field of journalism and publishing. He has contributed poetry to a variety of literary magazines and art journals, such as The Elevation Review, 300 Days of Sun, and The Ignatian Literary Magazine. His contributions to the Falls Church News-Press, a locally owned newspaper in the Washington, DC area, can be found online at fcnp.com.

Door to Door

Door to Door by Emma Walton Hamilton, reviewed by Alex Russell

Emma Walton Hamilton’s Door to Door is a short collection of poems portioned off into five distinct, interrelated sections: “Homeland”, “Relocation”, “The Swamp Angel”, “Inside Out,” and “Prism.” Varying in their compositional style – from free verse, observational poems to concise, rhyming pieces, conversational to experimental – Hamilton’s work retains a sense of earned wisdom, a careful patience with life, and a dedicated measure of emotional distance from some of the subject matter in the book. 

It is this slightly cold, somewhat detached tone – coupled with an artfully calculated language – that enables the better part of Door to Door to pick apart the dry eccentricities of life, from deciding what to wear every morning to the messy and contradicting nature of daily news and media, without lingering too long on any one topic or idea. 

Literally going “door to door,” Hamilton’s collection of poems weaves through different styles and sources of inspiration, wearing the latter on its sleeve.

Writing after poets Billy Collins, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Frank O’Hara, Hamilton pays genuine tribute to these writers, taking the time to pause in each creator’s respective aesthetic and chip away at a segment of her own personal life experience – illuminating it with self-knowledge and poetic craft. 

Movement, transience, impermanence – these are not just images or jumping-off points; Hamilton dives fully into these states and develops them as organic, fully-rounded themes.

“The Commute” is among the book’s lengthier pieces, concretely – and in naturalistic, Beat fashion – filtering through “the railway station,” “the city,” “the newspaper office,” all the way through “the same eternal round of events—/Murders, burglaries, suicides/by pistol, razor, rope, or poison,” condensing myriad daily observations into something crystalline. Hamilton carries the reader through physical places, past solid scenes inside familiar locations, all the while building on the book’s core themes.

“The Commute” starts with motion and ends in motion, as the narrator flies back “by rail/to my beloved swamp,/where I labor until dusk/overlooked only by an occasional crow.” In this small but pertinent fashion, Hamilton shines a light on transience as a kind of isolation or exile; not just a process, but a quagmirical state of mind. In fact, loneliness and solitude in its varying forms pops up time and again.

In “Spring Cleaning,” Hamilton recounts, in rhyme-free, matter-of-fact verse, the “residue of ten thousand meals,” “the sofa,” “every little room,” recontextualizing the living space she shares with her husband as a dangerous, stolid alcove – “our entrenchment.” 

Door to Door, despite its themes and overall impressions, features several poems with a strong sense of mise-en-scène, situating the narrator firmly in a specific setting – whether corporeal or emotional.

The seven-piece section near the volume’s middle, titled “The Swamp Angel,” powerfully removes the reader from wherever they might be and transplants them to Hamilton’s swamp – a place of nature, silence, and privacy. The seventh poem in this section, “Omega,” viscerally places the reader alongside Hamilton in her small, bog-surrounded home.

“The morning glory vines/had commenced peeping in at the front windows,” a place overwhelmingly abundant in “birds and trees,” “perched on the brink/of the palisades.” Hamilton’s physical location has her reevaluate her spot in life – a healthy, transformative episode of self-doubt and an eventual return to other people:

“But here was I/a single bit of humanity/trying to live alone and away from my kind…A hermit is one who tries to be a tree,/and draw nourishment from one spot/when he’s really a deal more./A bear is not so foolish as to try and live among foxes,/neither should a man try to live among trees…So I left my hermitage,/I presume forever.”

Earlier in the book, in “Relocation,” Hamilton shrinks her perspective from places and household objects to other creatures – “A Moon Snail, accommodating someone else’s eggs./A family of Slipper Snails, clinging to a Scallop./A Quahog Clam, teeming with seawater and sand. A micro-ocean.” This piece, consisting of just four stanzas, is a concise, illustrative example of connectivity and reflection. The writer sees her inner struggles in “a cluster of treasures” on the beach, “each its own biosphere.” 

“The host shells are otherwise empty,/neither landlord nor tenants having anticipated the tide,” a mournful, nuanced assessment of places that once possessed occupants; the signs of an old existence.

“I played God for a moment,/placing each one gently back in the surf–/cleaving to hope.” This encapsulates Hamilton’s strengths as a writer, strengths that are key to understanding and appreciating Door to Door.

Writing poetry from observations, experiences, and inspiration – whatever these might be – is a very old, at times therapeutic form of art, allowing the writer to reanalyze or make peace with something painful, difficult, or pervasive in their life. Playing God with the “host shells” on the beach represents the personification of her literary vocation  – a look into her process and underlying motivation.

With recurring reflections into her daily living, there comes a small measure of peace. “I fiddle with my hair, pick or pluck/at minor divertissements, and compose myself/in prelude to the day.”  

It is this ability to focus, in and out, on things, creatures, instances, scenes, and places – big and small – that characterizes her deeply personal, yet universal, and artfully balanced poetry. Door to Door is an opportunity to explore the occasional “beauty and harmony” in grounded, ordinary lives – with danger and chaos “just outside the margins.”

Emma Walton Hamilton 

Door to Door

Published 2022, Andrews McMeel Publishing

Alex Russell earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from George Mason University and now works in the field of journalism and publishing. He has contributed poetry to a variety of literary magazines and art journals, such as The Elevation Review, 300 Days of Sun, and The Ignatian Literary Magazine. His contributions to the Falls Church News-Press, a locally owned newspaper in the Washington, DC area, can be found online at fcnp.com.

Time Is A Mother

Time Is A Mother by Ocean Vuong (reviewed by Alex Russell)

It can be very difficult, when evaluating a piece of art — in this case, Ocean Vuong’s sophomore poetry collection, Time is a Mother — not to make comparisons to other, related works. It is almost a compulsion; having to connect the thing you are talking about to something else just to explain it better.

Connection, successfully or unsuccessfully, pleasantly or with disastrous aftermath, is a major theme in Vuong’s work; something that he evaluates with ease, though, never bogging the narrative imagery down. He does it earnestly and with alarming certitude. As a writer reading another writer’s stone-cold brilliance is envy-inducing and inspiring. As a reader, it takes me out of myself to reconnect me with some of my missing pieces.

Vuong’s sharp and powerful command over his chosen method of communication with the outside world is exemplified through his control of pacing and rhythm.

“The Bull,” an introductory piece, is a crystal clear, unflinching realization centering on physical as well as emotional touch. It’s also a very gorgeous, near-sublime poem about understanding yourself through the help of something (or someone) else.

Most if not all of the poems in Time is a Mother are gorgeous. Many of them seek to provide context for the painful, and sometimes unexplainable things, in life.

It may be difficult for readers unfamiliar with confessional poetry — developed and brought to cultural and academic acknowledgement by many brilliant writers such as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Allen Ginsberg — to feel comfortable with Vuong’s words. That is okay.

The occasionally jagged edges of his stanzas (visually) and the occasionally robust, economical, or jarring word-choice (for example: “fuck he said/oh fuck you’re so much/like my little brother,” from the poem “Dear Peter”), are intentional in their bluntness without shining a big glaring spotlight on themselves. Being human can be a brutal experience; Vuong’s work, in its careful and empathetic approach to life and people, provides a series of images that ring with honesty and a simple goal of saying, here it is.

There are signs and symbols one might not expect in Time is a Mother. The image of a Colt factory, or a plate of “triple stack…jumbo pancakes at Denny’s after top surgery.” 

“New England’s endless/leaves. Maybe I saw a boy/in a black apron crying in a Nissan/the size of a monster’s coffin.” These pictures feel all the more real because Vuong does not shy away from an intimate and painstakingly real point of view.

Some of these scenes almost ooze with palpable isolation, like the “backyard, so dark,” evoking, at least in my mind, the great painting Cape Cod Evening by Edward Hopper.

There are voices from other rooms and other eras peeking through as well. They appear like visitors or guides to provide commentary or elucidation. They are not necessarily foreign to Vuong; they are rhythms and sounds he might have picked up on his way.

“I know the room you’ve been crying in/is called America,” from “Beautiful Short Loser,” sounds like something from a piece of prose out of a Jack Kerouac novel. Yet it also feels indigenous to Vuong’s experience as a writer and as a person. The two are inseparable if you do it for long enough.

The prose-poem “Nothing,” near the middle of the book, is reminiscent in form and style to Dennis Cooper’s poetry. Violence and homosexuality and deep, passionate love are all characteristics of Vuong’s verse, just as they are of Cooper’s. Perhaps this is another junction where their poetry meets — however temporarily. The further one reads, the more obvious it becomes: Vuong’s voice and syntax are entirely his own. 

A segment from “Nothing” reads, “But to live like a bullet, to touch people with such intention. To be born going one way, toward everything alive.” This is how Vuong’s poems found me with his first poetry book, Night Sky with Exit Wounds and this is how it finds me now, with Time is a Mother.

Of Vietnamese heritage, Vuong paints surrealistic scenes of the war in Vietnam in both collections. In this book, however, unlike in his first, surrealism becomes almost an end and not just a means. Sometimes horrible things cannot be explained, but their debilitating effects can be weakened through deconstruction. 

“On the wall, the shadows of their erections fall, then rise./We are rare in goodness, and rarer still in joy./Their clothes/return to them, like crumpled laws./He walks backwards as the soldier walks backward. They/smile at each other until both are out of sight. The night/returns to itself, less whole. The Maybelle Auto marquee a/beacon in the fog.” Thus ends one of his poems, “Künstlerroman.” It appears near the end.

Violence, war, tragedy, love, sex, death, spatial emptiness, emotional emptiness, terrains of all kinds, and the colors of nature and of night, among many other things, make up the ingredients of Vuong’s work. He finds a balance for everything wrong and right in the world.

Time is a Mother succeeds because it doesn’t play games with the reader or with itself. There is a deep search for justice, a cry like a voice out of the forest on the edge of town, that cuts into the air and holds. Where there is no justice found, Vuong’s poetry sticks around to remind the reader that justice is a stepping stone on the way to love — and that love makes us and unmakes us, over and over.

Time Is A Mother by Ocean Vuong, published in 2022 by Penguin Press. 114 pages.

Alex Russell earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from George Mason University and now works in the field of journalism and publishing. He has contributed poetry to a variety of literary magazines and art journals, such as The Elevation Review, 300 Days of Sun, and The Ignatian Literary Magazine. His contributions to the Falls Church News-Press, a locally owned newspaper in the Washington, DC area, can be found online at fcnp.com.