Alan Shuptrine

His style is Realism with highly detailed and dramatic lighting in his landscapes and figurative paintings. Shuptrine’s medium is primarily watercolor which he applies and controls in various techniques, from wet-in-wet to drybrush. He also creates using egg tempera, oil, the centuries-old art of water gilding with genuine gold leaf, wood carving, and sgraffito. He prefers to handcraft and carve his own frames for his paintings, a practice of two of his influences: James McNeill Whistler, and Charles Prendergast. His other influences include the works of his father, Hubert Shuptrine, Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and John Singer Sargent.

Following the Vero Beach exhibition, the Huntsville Museum of Art and The Tennessee State Museum selected Shuptrine’s watercolors for their permanent collections. After participating in numerous juried exhibitions and receiving awards from national and international watercolor societies, Shuptrine is now launching his first solo museum exhibition in May, 2017.

Alan Shuptrine: Appalachian Watercolors of the Serpentine Chain will open at Tennessee State Museum and will celebrate the Celtic roots of the Appalachian Mountains. Serving as a monument to the descendants of early English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh who settled the Eastern Seaboard, this art collection and soon-to-be coffee table book and documentary film, will collectively preserve mountain heritage and traditions for future generations. But for all the beautiful scenery, at its core this exhibition is about heritage, with Appalachian ties to the old country that can be seen in folk tales, quilt patterns, and fiddle tunes. In the 18th century, when many British people immigrated to America, they didn't feel comfortable on the coast, so they kept moving westward. When they got to the Appalachians, it felt familiar, like home, so they settled there. Unbeknownst to them, they were settling in the same mountains they had just left behind, an ocean way."The paintings are quite varied in subject matter: Stirring the Mash shows a group of moonshiners preparing their product in the dim light of dusk, in a clearing hidden by the mountains and shrouded in fog. In Mist and Lace, the fog gives the mountain in the background an otherwordly [sic?] quality, while in the foreground are crisply rendered flowers catching the sunlight. Just Before Dawn silhouettes a branching tree against the pale sky, with the roof of a house just visible behind the barbed-wire fence."

As of October 2017, Alan and his wife are current residents of Lookout Mountain, Georgia, Shuptrine's pursuit of the arts includes schooling at The Baylor School (Chattanooga, TN); The University of the South (Sewanee, TN); and The University of Tennessee (Knoxville, TN).

Alan Shuptrine (born March 31, 1963) A painter known for his Southern and Appalachian Mountains genre, Alan Shuptrine has extended his reputation from a renowned framemaker and water gilder to a nationally acclaimed watercolorist. Born the son of recognized painter, Hubert Shuptrine (1936-2006), Alan has continued the legacy of realism that both Andrew Wyeth and his father Hubert established.