In the Bag

Nashvillian Tupper Saussy has always been an artist. As a child he excelled in both art and music, and while in college during the mid-’50s at the University of the South, Sewanee, he studied watercolor with Alain de Leiris, a respected Delacroix scholar. After graduation though, he moved to Nashville, married and entered advertising. He was still interested in art and on occasion would paint or take photographs, but it was nothing serious. Then came a divorce, followed by a decision to quit his job, and his days became long and unstructured. So he went back to painting. He had already taken up songwriting—his band the Neon Philharmonic had a pop hit in 1969 with the Saussy-penned song “Morning Girl”—but he needed something more. Taking “consolation in the art,” he was by 1973 exhibiting his work at Cheekwood. Interested in that which is so often taken for granted, his paintings frequently featured paper bags, as well as objects like paper towel rolls, toilet paper rolls or a cardboard box of ginger snaps. It was their structure that intrigued him, their ability to be simple yet detailed and almost always overlooked. During this time, he was also developing his soon-to-be-controversial stance against taxation. When the Justice Department investigated him in 1985, he was found guilty on one failure to file tax returns. Rather than face a one-year prison sentence, he went into seclusion, becoming a fugitive during the course of the next decade. When Saussy finally surrendered, it was peacefully, and during his time underground and while in prison, he never quit painting entirely. Now that he’s once again residing in Nashville, he’s ready for another show, at Stanford Fine Art. Here, the everyday includes a broom laid casually against the side of a doorframe, two Adirondack chairs sitting in the summer sun, an early-morning landscape with the light sweeping across. There is also Saussy’s favorite, the paper bag. “Flamingo Incognito” shows a gray-blue expanse of quivering water and a lone graceful flamingo, its head covered by a paper bag. In “When Bags Go Shopping,” there’s the front window display of a Louis Vuitton store and a twisted paper bag flying through the air outside. If anything marks Saussy’s work, it’s his matter-of-fact sense of humor, rife with puns and clever turns of phrase. In “Six of One, Half-dozen of the Other,” six pinecones rest atop six sugar cones, while in “The Supervisor,” a crocodile watches carefully from his edge of the frame as a bright flock of flamingoes cavort unknowingly in the water. In terms of style, however, Saussy has moved toward a more computer-oriented working method. If he so desired, Saussy could still “paint from scratch,” but he prefers working in mixed-media, combining traditional painting techniques with digital photography. In the end result, his work has a clarity that’s almost unnatural. The images are palpably real and the color strikingly clean. It’s not a harsh purity, either: it’s dreamy, alive, how the person staring at the painting wishes the world could look. “I’m a watercolorist first and a photographer last,” the artist explains. “What the picture starts out as is a photograph, but I consider the camera as more of my notebook. I’m not satisfied with the photograph. I’ve got to mess with it. I’ve got to have pigment running and blending and doing what watercolor does. That’s what keeps the finished product from being a photograph, and that’s what makes it a watercolor.  “When you’re trying to create your own point of view in art,” Saussy continues, “you can’t make comprises. You have to let your statement come out and then let the heavens fall if it’s wrong. And then, so what? The worst thing that can happen is that no one buys it.”