Sara Suppan

Off-Kilter Arrangements

Sara Suppan is a Minneapolis-based artist. Her vibrant still-life paintings often feature ordinary objects in off-kilter arrangements, uncovering the strangeness and play that underpin the everyday.

Read on for an exclusive interview.

A: Your work often showcases the beauty of everyday objects. What makes something ordinary worthy of a closer look?

SS: I like funny little stuff; the kind of stuff I come across all the time. I like to include ants and ladybugs because they’re friendly, lip balm because I’m addicted to it, goofy socks paired with formal shoes because this says so much about the wearer. I like what happens when I make a bad drawing within a good painting: the magic trick of cutting through an elaborate, nicely-depicted image with something sloppy and silly.

A: Is there a difference, to you, between making something beautiful and making something worthy of attention?

SS: No, actually, I think the act of singling an ordinary object out to be painted beautifully confers to a viewer that, at minimum, this was something worth the artist’s time and therefore is worth the time to look. The artist points and the viewer’s eyes follow. There is a beautiful way to depict almost anything, and that which is beautiful always commands attention.

A: Familiar objects often carry meaning across generations. What makes an object of your work belong to a particular time and what allows it to transcend that time?

SS: I am most attracted to pre-digital objects, and to things that existed in the pre-digital age as they do now: analog clocks, wooden pencils, paper snowflakes, radiators, houseplants, bananas, and such. Sometimes my paintings will include some more contemporary signifiers to displace the scene from a particular time, such as a stick-poke tattoo or a certain branded lip balm. But mostly I paint these older or timeless things because I am only interested in that which I find small and beautiful and good. I live in the world of my paintings: my apartment has no digital clocks, no television, no microwave, no sound system, no smart devices. I don’t even have a car. The dizzying of speed of contemporary life, the deluge of too-much information, the noise of it all is antithetical to my painting.

The Artistic License™ Series

A love of great art has been central to our brand since its inception in 1984. But in 2005, we formalized that love by launching our Artistic License™ Series, a program through which we collaborate with artists to showcase their work in our boutiques, online and on our bags.

We love finding artists who push norms and inspire us with cutting-edge work. Each year, we aim to feature art completely different from what we’ve ever shown. Photography, oil painting, claymation, illustration, cinematic staging — we’re into it all, and we hope you are too.

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