As a watercolorist Hubert Shuptrine was exceptional; instead of fluid brushstrokes, he tightly controlled the medium so that it resembled tempera. This approach was well suited to his earthy landscapes and portrayals of individuals who often had crease-lined faces. He called working with watercolor akin to “chasing rainbows.”
Shuptrine was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and spent most of his life there. He was a precocious child who loved to draw; he was also preoccupied with horses. He took a correspondence course in art, and at the urging of his parents he began to study veterinary medicine at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. After an encounter with studio art, he changed his major and school, graduating in 1959 from the University of Chattanooga (now University of Tennessee, Chattanooga) with a degree in fine arts painting.
During the following decade Shuptrine worked in oil and created abstract compositions. A dramatic turning point happened on a 1970 vacation in Maine; initially planned as a two-week stay, he remained for three months. It was there that he taught himself how to paint with watercolors, emulating such other talented Maine artists as Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, John Marin, and Andrew Wyeth. Shuptrine developed his own approach, saying: “I was fascinated with watercolors. If I had studied it in art school it wouldn’t be the same. Most watercolors are very pastel, wet in wet; that didn’t seem important to me.” He was particular: “I don’t shackle myself with inferior materials and supplies. Handmade paper is my choice, over machine or mold made varieties, and its inconsistency and unpredictability are exciting.” He became proficient with the use of drybrush—a technique in which the artist squeezes most of the water out of the brush before applying pigment to paper with tiny strokes.
In 1974 Shuptrine collaborated with James Dickey on an oversized volume (it weighs slightly less than seven pounds). The result was Jericho: The South Beheld. Poet and novelist Dickey, known for his talents as a Southern storyteller, wrote the text to accompany Shuptrine’s paintings, which serve as visual counterparts to Dickey’s words. The artist traveled 15,000 miles along back roads, studying local customs, mountain people, African Americans, and Native Americans, especially the Cherokee. In depicting them and their circumstances he became something of a preservationist as he realized there were fewer family farms and truly rural communities, portraying as he labeled it “the vanishing South.” Dickey paid his partner the following tribute: “Hubert Shuptrine works in watercolor with a beautiful sense of the sheer, living consequentiality of his subject and with a skill that makes every picture an event to be reckoned with. He is a Beholder.”
Working in watercolor for over thirty years, Shuptrine excelled in painting people in their own environments. “To me a character study is the apex of artistic expression and challenge. An awareness of people is obviously a prerequisite for character studies. One cannot expect to work with people if one doesn’t like them, and the mountaineers are quick to sense insincerity. … But once assured that they are being ‘held up to no shame,’ my friends and neighbors will sit for me while I sketch.” A year before his death in 2006 Shuptrine received the Distinguished Artist Award, one of seven of the Governor’s Arts Awards selected by the Tennessee Arts Commission.