 | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(March 2023) |
Alan Shuptrine (born March 31, 1963) is an American painter known for his Southern and Appalachian Mountains genre. He is a frame-maker, water gilder, and watercolorist. He is the son of painter Hubert Shuptrine (1936-2006). [1]
Born in 1963, Shuptrine was raised in more than 20 Appalachian Mountain towns along the Eastern seaboard. His father, Hubert, travelled all over the South for his inspirations, and would often take him along, becoming his mentor and teacher. In 1975, the family returned to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Shuptrine attended school on Lookout Mountain before beginning at the Baylor School in 1976. After graduating from high school, Shuptrine continued his education at The University of the South and the University of Tennessee. [2]
In 1985, after graduation from college, Shuptrine began working his father, who at the time was writing his second book, Home to Jericho. Shuptrine began framing for his father, handcrafting custom water gilded frames. This led to framing for other artists including Andrew Wyeth. In 1987 Shuptrine began his own company, Gold Leaf Designs, Inc. [3] (Chattanooga, TN). While continuing to frame for his father, he also began framing for museums, art galleries, artists, historical institutions, designers, and interior decorators. Shuptrine's frames and period restorations can be found in The Greenville County Museum of Art, The Hunter Museum of American Art, The Birmingham Museum of Art, The Huntsville Museum of Art, The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, The Tennessee State Museum, The New Orleans Museum of Art, and The Columbia Museum of Art. [4]
In 2005, following the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, The New Orleans Museum of Art employed Shuptrine to make on-site repairs and restorations of the frames and gilded objects within the permanent collection. [5] He has also provided extensive period restoration and conservation for Melrose Plantation at Natchez National Historical Park, The Philip Schutze Collection at the Atlanta History Center's historical Swan House, the Governor's Mansion of Georgia, the Governor's Mansion of South Carolina, the President James K. Polk Home and Museum, and Cheekwood Estate and Gardens (Nashville, TN). [3] Shuptrine has been invited to be an Artist in Residence for the Palmetto Bluff / Montage Resort in Bluffton, SC for August, 2023. [6]
Though framing and restoration became a primary focus, Shuptrine continued to paint and be mentored by his father. Alan Shuptrine's painting style is Realism, much like his father's, with highly detailed and dramatic lighting in his landscapes and figurative paintings. [2] Shuptrine's medium is primarily watercolor which he applies and controls in various techniques, from wet-in-wet to dry-brush. [2] He also creates using egg tempera, oil paint, water gilding with genuine gold leaf, wood carving, and sgraffito. [7] He prefers to handcraft and carve his own frames for his paintings, a practice of two of his influences: James McNeill Whistler, and Charles Prendergast. His other influences include the works of his father, Hubert Shuptrine, Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Stephen Scott Young, and John Singer Sargent. [4]
Shuptrine was asked to participate in an exhibit, "In the Tradition of Wyeth: Contemporary Watercolor Masters", at the Vero Beach Museum of Art in 2010. Following the Vero Beach exhibition, Shuptrine participated in a solo two-year, four-museum run in 2017-2019 with the exhibition, Alan Shuptrine: Appalachian Watercolors of the Serpentine Chain. [2] The exhibition was displayed at the Morris Museum of Art, the Huntsville Museum of Art and The Tennessee State Museum. All three museums selected Shuptrine's watercolors for their permanent collections. His solo exhibition opened at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville and celebrated the Celtic roots of the Appalachian Mountains. [2]
In 2019-2020, Shuptrine collaborated with author and Appalachian Trail expert Jennifer Pharr Davis. [2] This book is self-published and titled I Come From A Place. This book contains a collection of images from Shuptrine's museum exhibition, as well as newer watercolors. The book was awarded the Independent Publisher's Book Award for Best Southeastern Non-Fiction Book for 2020. [8]
Alan Shuptrine and his wife Bonny reside in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. They own Shuptrine's Gallery, located in the Broad Street Design District in Chattanooga, Tennessee. [3] The gallery exhibits American art and provides custom framing and period restoration. [9]
Henriette Wyeth Hurd was an American artist noted for her portraits and still life paintings. The eldest daughter of illustrator N.C. Wyeth, she studied painting with her father and brother Andrew Wyeth at their home and studio in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
Andrew Newell Wyeth was an American visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He believed he was also an abstractionist, portraying subjects in a new, meaningful way. The son of N. C. Wyeth and father of Jamie Wyeth, he was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century. James H. Duff explores the art and lives of the three men in An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art. Raised with an appreciation of nature, Wyeth took walks that fired his imagination. Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, and King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925) inspired him intellectually and artistically. Wyeth featured in a documentary The Metaphor in which he discussed Vidor's influence on the creation of his works of art, like Winter 1946 and Portrait of Ralph Kline. Wyeth was also inspired by Winslow Homer and Renaissance artists.
The Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway was a railway company that operated in the U.S. states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia. It began as the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, chartered in Nashville on December 11, 1845, built to 5 ft gauge and was the first railway to operate in the state of Tennessee. By the turn of the twentieth century, the NC&StL grew into one of the most important railway systems in the southern United States.
James Browning Wyeth is an American realist painter, son of Andrew Wyeth, and grandson of N.C. Wyeth. He was raised in Chadds Ford Township, Pennsylvania, and is artistic heir to the Brandywine School tradition — painters who worked in the rural Brandywine River area of Delaware and Pennsylvania, portraying its people, animals, and landscape.
Charles Ephraim Burchfield was an American painter and visionary artist, known for his passionate watercolors of nature scenes and townscapes. The largest collection of Burchfield's paintings, archives and journals are in the collection of the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo. His paintings are in the collections of more than 109 museums in the USA and have been the subject of exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as other prominent institutions.
The Canton Museum of Art, founded in 1935, is a community arts organization designed to encourage and promote the fine arts in Canton, Ohio.
William Edmondson was the first African-American folk art sculptor to be given a one-person show exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (1937).
Darell John Koons was an American painter. He was a member of the art faculty at Bob Jones University for forty years.
Alice R. Ballard is an American ceramicist based in Clover, South Carolina. Much of her work is characterized by the organic earthenware forms of closed containers, pinch pots, platters, pods, teapots, totems, small work, vessels and a series she refers to as her white work. Much of her work is finished with terra sigillata. Alice considers her art to be “a reflection of [her] relationship with natural forms. It is often the metamorphosis of Nature's forms, as they change from season to season, that attracts her to that universal world in which differing life forms share similar qualities." Her aesthetic heavily references the mother/child/germination metaphor and also explores the more evocative realm of wonder and awe.
Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer was an American illustrator, painter, and printmaker who painted and illustrated Tennessee society, including the state's women and children. As a printmaker, she pioneered the white-line woodcut.
Stephen Scott Young is an American artist best known for his watercolor paintings and etchings that depict everyday life on the east coast of the United States and the Out Islands of The Bahamas. Often painting genre scenes of quotidian life, Young's work is noted for his strikingly realist use of watercolor and eloquent simplicity of subject matter done in the American realist tradition. Young's copperplate etchings evidence a strident attention to detail and intricacy that suggest the influence of Rembrandt and Whistler. Though the images he creates are often nostalgic, his work deals with contemporary issues. Art historian Henry Adams wrote of Young in the late 1980s: "He is like one of those prospectors who has gone back to the tailings of an abandoned mine and where others saw only useless rocks found quantities of untapped, undiscovered gold." He has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and has work in major American museums, including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Greenville County Museum of Art, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
Will Henry Stevens was an American modernist painter and naturalist. Stevens is known for his paintings and tonal pastels depicting the rural Southern landscape, abstractions of nature, and non-objective works. His paintings are in the collections of over forty museums in the US, including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
John Baeder is an American painter closely associated with the photorealist movement. He is best known for his detailed paintings of American roadside diners and eateries.
Warren Adelson is an American art dealer, art historian, and author specializing in 19th and 20th-century American Painting as well as contemporary art.
Willie Young is a 20th-century American artist. Young is mainly self-taught, and his work has been exhibited alongside other prominent outsider artists, such as Bill Traylor, Nellie Mae Rowe and Thornton Dial. The main body of his work consists of delicately rendered graphite drawings.
Thomas Brent Funderburk is a long known visual artist and W. L. Giles Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art at Mississippi State University, where he has worked since 1982. He is an active artist, known for his large-format, exuberantly hued, often naturalistic watermedia paintings. His art has been displayed in many juried exhibitions, specialized art magazines and annual publications. Funderburk is also noted for his illustrated lecture performances, curation, and workshops. Funderburk acknowledges influences by watercolor painters such as Charles E. Burchfield, Walter Inglis Anderson and Edward Reep. In 2024, he was the recipient of the Mississippi Governor's Arts Award for Excellence in Visual Arts and Education.
Laurin McCracken is an American watercolor painter known for his photorealistic still lifes, florals, landscapes and other subjects.
The New England Watercolor Society, originally named the Boston Watercolor Society, is an artist-run organization formed to promote and exhibit work by watercolor painters. It was also at one time known as the Boston Society of Watercolor Painters. It is headquartered in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
American composer, pianist and painter Ann Wyeth McCoy was the youngest daughter of artist-illustrator N.C. Wyeth and the fourth of his five children. She was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
Byron Gordon McKeeby (1936-1984) was an American artist, educator and master printmaker known primarily for lithography. McKeeby's interest dovetailed with a burgeoning contemporary community in advancing lithography as an art form. He was active in all form of print exhibition. He built a full scope printmaking department of rank at the University of Tennessee that exists today.