Jack Stuppin: ACA Galleries, New York, NY
By Doug McClemont
ARTNews, June 2010

This show, of 14 large oil paintings an dozens of smaller ones, all created between 1996 and 2009, was titled “Songs of the Earth.” New York-born painter Jack Stuppin chose Sonoma County, California, as his home and main subject. The landscape as seen by Stuppin is a bright rolling symphony of colors and curves. And the artist’s thick impasto style and saturated palette combine to make a stylized, glossy vision of nature.

In this show, which originated at the San Jose Museum of Art, imposing cloud formations seemed like iing on the earth’s cake. The blue-green luster of Stuppin’s horizontal bougs was created with uniform heavy but somehow gentle brushstrokes. His orange hills, which couldn’t help but evoke the female form, depicted real hilly landscape that is so vivid it appears as if it might be breathing. One of the artist’s most memorable touches is in the way he depicts coastal rock formations. The smooth sinewy shapes are made of grays, blues, purples, and browns, and each feels perfectly placed. In Stuppin’s world, lacking edges or discord, even powerful ocean waves crashing against rock are harmonious.