Artist Biography & Facts

Hubert Shuptrine

Shuptrine at first wanted to become a veterinarian but changed his major after observing a studio art class in college, and graduated in 1959 from the University of Chattanooga with a bachelor's degree in fine arts painting.He earned numerous awards as an abstract oil painter in the 1960's and taught himself watercolor painting during an extended family vacation to Maine, in 1970.  From then on, he began chronicling the South and its people in images rendered in watercolor.  He traveled back roads, becoming the chronicler of  the Old South and its threatened way of life.  He collaborated with the Southern storyteller James Dickey in the 1974 book publication  Jericho: The South Behold, and published another book Home to Jericho, in 1987.

About watercolor painting he said: "It is often hit-and-miss.  I have startovers and failures. I fact, I estimate that nine out of ten end up in file thirteen.  And some paintings are pure accident."  Yet he persistet, working in watercolor for four decades believing, the freshness and intimacy of a watercolor could not be achieved in any other medium.

Shuptrine's work is in the permanent collections of over 50 national museums, including the Brandywine Museum in Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania, and the Butler Institute in Youngstown, Ohio.

Sources include: essay by Martha R. Severens, Curator at the Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina; Alan Shuptrine Fine Art

Hubert Shuptrine, American (1936 - 2006)

“Hubert Shuptrine works in watercolor with a beautiful sense of the sheer, living consequentiality of his subject and with a skill that makes every picture an event to be reckoned with. He is a Beholder. He is able to enter into objects and people and places with the sense of these things entering into him." -- James Dickey, Jericho: The South Beheld.

Nationally acclaimed artist, Hubert Shuptrine (1936 – 2006) created paintings that embodied the marrow of an entire region, the vanishing South-the people, the traditions, and landscape. Whether focusing on the pattern of creases in a timeworn face, the tiniest strands of whiskers in a bristly beard, or the uneven rhythm of weathered boards on the side of an old cabin, Shuptrine was able to capture the essence of his subjects and provide a depth in his paintings which he referred to as “realizations.”.

In depicting people, he saw his images more as a form of visual biography than as portraiture. His goal was to reveal in all his subjects "the sum of moments - past, present, and future infused into a single glance." Shuptrine's brushwork ranges from broad wet washes of subtle color to a drybrush technique characterized by tiny strokes of tightly controlled pigment mixed with very little water. He said this technical variety enabled him to render broad atmospheric effects such as mist laden skies, or morning light spilling through a window, casting shadows, and revealing intricate details and textures.

However, his realistic technique is in no way intended to diminish the expressive power of his paintings. As Shuptrine explained, "I don't think of myself as a realist because if you look up that word in the dictionary, it is one who paints with precision without regard for ideology, feeling, or the potential of meanings. I refer to my works as 'realizations' because I like the subjective part of painting as much as the objective part of painting. I like to be involved with my subjects so that what I am painting is emotion as much as surface appearance."

Shuptrine is known for his realistic drybrush watercolors, although he began his artistic career in the realm of abstract expressionism. In 1963, his passion to see the turquoise waters of the Bahamas, where Winslow Homer visited, led him to move his family of 5. While there, he explored various different mediums and subject matter. Returning to the states in 1966, Shuptrine was drawn to the Eastern Seaboard, specifically the coast of Maine. As he began his transition of oil and gouache expressionism to watercolor realism. Shuptrine quickly made a name for himself at the grass roots art exhibition called Plum Nelly, located in Lookout Mountain in Georgia. Word quickly spread of the artist whose works were infused with an inner light and extreme attention to detail.

By 1970, Shuptrine’s works would sell out before the gates had even opened. His reputation reached the ears of several fine art museums, and he was invited to exhibit at the Birmingham Museum of Art and The Montgomery Museum of Fine Art. It was during this time that Shuptrine relocated his family to Highlands, NC. And in 1974, the artist published his first book Jericho: The South Beheld (Oxmoor House) penned by celebrated author and Poet Laureate of South Carolina, James Dickey. Dickey had just written Deliverance and it was being made into a movie in nearby Toccoa, Georgia. Jericho sold over 1 million copies and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, along with winning the Carrey Thomas Award. Home to Jericho (1987) , the artist’s second book, also was award-winning and cemented Shuptrine as an established and renowned watercolor painter.

His subject matter evolved to include what he termed, The Vanishing South. Focusing on individuals and locations throughout the Southeast, his compositions included life in the Low Country (the Gullah and Geechee people), as well as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, located in western North Carolina.

Shuptrine continued to receive invitations to museum exhibitions. His works are featured in the permanent collections of numerous and national fine art museums including the Brandywine Museum, (Chadd’s Ford, PA), The Butler Institute of American Art (Youngstown, OH), the Greenville County Museum of Art (Greenville, SC), and the Tennessee State Museum (Nashville, TN).

As described by Martha Severens, the former Curator for the Greenville County Museum of Art “Historian, raconteur, preservationist, and consummate craftsman, Shuptrine is all of the above in these paintings that chronicle the people, places, and things that he reveres. While more than [half] of a century has passed since he and Dickey embarked on their joint endeavor Jericho, one still senses Shuptrine’s passion for what he paints. As the prophet Joshua said of Jericho, “for the place whereon thou standest is holy”, and just as surely sacred is the American South to Hubert Shuptrine.”

He was invited to join the membership of the distinguished but very private, Bohemian Grove Club in San Francisco, California.

Hubert Shuptrine is one of seven Tennesseans to win the 2005 Governor's Awards in the Arts. According to Rich Boyd, executive director of the Tennessee Arts Commission, these awards are considered the state's highest honor in the arts. Susan Pierce, of the Chattanooga Times Free Press, writes that "the Distinguished Artist Award recognizes exceptional talent and creativity in any discipline, honoring artists whose works have influenced directions and trends on a state or national level."

Shuptrine passed away Friday, April 7th, 2006, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, leaving behind a family of artists, including daughter and artist, Stephanie Shuptrine, and sons, filmmaker Randall Shuptrine, nationally acclaimed watercolorist Alan Shuptrine (www.alanshuptrine.com). He leaves behind a legacy of supreme artistic ability and a passion for capturing his subjects in an honest and true light.

Honors:
Shuptrine was the recipient of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Distinguished Alumnus Award; the Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity Citation; commendations by the U. S. Senate, U. S. House of Representatives, Tennessee State Legislature; an honorary membership in the University of Tennessee Alpha Scholastic Society; Key to the City of several southern cities; and was listed in Personalities of the South.

Permanent Museum Collections:
Brandywine Museum, Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania
The Birmingham Museum of Fine Art
Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio
Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, South Carolina
Florence Museum of Art
Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee
Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, Alabama
Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, Tennessee
The Montgomery Museum of Fine Art
Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia
Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, Tennessee

Permanent Collections of several historical and other museums, corporations, and private clients.

HUBERT OLIVER SHUPTRINE (1936–2006)

As a watercolorist Hubert Shuptrine was exceptional; instead of fluid brushstrokes, he tightly controlled the medium so that it resembled tempera. This approach was well suited to his earthy landscapes and portrayals of individuals who often had crease-lined faces. He called working with watercolor akin to “chasing rainbows.”

Shuptrine was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and spent most of his life there. He was a precocious child who loved to draw; he was also preoccupied with horses. He took a correspondence course in art, and at the urging of his parents he began to study veterinary medicine at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. After an encounter with studio art, he changed his major and school, graduating in 1959 from the University of Chattanooga (now University of Tennessee, Chattanooga) with a degree in fine arts painting.

During the following decade Shuptrine worked in oil and created abstract compositions. A dramatic turning point happened on a 1970 vacation in Maine; initially planned as a two-week stay, he remained for three months. It was there that he taught himself how to paint with watercolors, emulating such other talented Maine artists as Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, John Marin, and Andrew Wyeth. Shuptrine developed his own approach, saying: “I was fascinated with watercolors. If I had studied it in art school it wouldn’t be the same. Most watercolors are very pastel, wet in wet; that didn’t seem important to me.” He was particular: “I don’t shackle myself with inferior materials and supplies. Handmade paper is my choice, over machine or mold made varieties, and its inconsistency and unpredictability are exciting.” He became proficient with the use of drybrush—a technique in which the artist squeezes most of the water out of the brush before applying pigment to paper with tiny strokes.


In 1974 Shuptrine collaborated with James Dickey on an oversized volume (it weighs slightly less than seven pounds). The result was Jericho: The South Beheld. Poet and novelist Dickey, known for his talents as a Southern storyteller, wrote the text to accompany Shuptrine’s paintings, which serve as visual counterparts to Dickey’s words. The artist traveled 15,000 miles along back roads, studying local customs, mountain people, African Americans, and Native Americans, especially the Cherokee. In depicting them and their circumstances he became something of a preservationist as he realized there were fewer family farms and truly rural communities, portraying as he labeled it “the vanishing South.” Dickey paid his partner the following tribute: “Hubert Shuptrine works in watercolor with a beautiful sense of the sheer, living consequentiality of his subject and with a skill that makes every picture an event to be reckoned with. He is a Beholder.”

Working in watercolor for over thirty years, Shuptrine excelled in painting people in their own environments. “To me a character study is the apex of artistic expression and challenge. An awareness of people is obviously a prerequisite for character studies. One cannot expect to work with people if one doesn’t like them, and the mountaineers are quick to sense insincerity. … But once assured that they are being ‘held up to no shame,’ my friends and neighbors will sit for me while I sketch.” A year before his death in 2006 Shuptrine received the Distinguished Artist Award, one of seven of the Governor’s Arts Awards selected by the Tennessee Arts Commission.

The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina
thejohnsoncollection.org