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.
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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.