Sara Suppan’s oil paintings create a screwball vision of everyday life

“Some of my work is what I call ‘good paintings of bad drawings’”, says Sara Suppan, an oil painter whose evocative work features scenes such as wristwatches Sharpie’d onto skin and frowny faces keyed into cars. Skirting between sincerity and tongue-in-cheek humour, Sara validates the absurdity of life by skillfully rendering the crude and silly. Endearing, screwball vignettes of everyday life are shown through freckles of light beaming on a banana, a fancy cocktail lying on top of a childish drawing, Cheeto-dusted fingertips – objects of comedy all lovingly caught in strokes of luminous oil colours.

“I come from farmers and approach painting in a farmer-ly manner, rising every morning to do the studio chores and to put in long hours tending my canvases,” Sara says. Sara’s commentary on labour doubles as a tribute to blue-collar workers and the labour of painting itself, heightening the status of the lowbrow by pouring hours into capturing photorealistic elements. Not without humour, Sara reveals attitudes around art and work through origami butterflies made of cash and burst ink pens in pockets, opening up the professional world for playfulness. “I’m forever trying to sharpen my technical abilities to maximize lushness and depth,” she says. “But only in the service of cutting through that beauty with something goofy.”