Front & Centre   by The Jaywalker Gadabout

                       At home with

Sally Chupick

    Kingston has a certain reputation among locals. Those that move away, like yo-yos, always, eventually, move back. Sometimes we return to our alma mater. Sometimes we return on a military transport. Often our return is entirely inexplicable. No matter what the impetus for our return - be it familiarity, career or mysterious salmon-like force - we settle back to the fossilized sediments of the Limestone City and call it home again.

    Sally Chupick knows all about the Kingston Effect. Her last departure was to Australia, where she and her family spent three years, finally returning to this area and setting up her workshop, the Stoneheath Studio. This early nineteenth-century limestone farmhouse is a fitting location for Sally's paintings - works that transport us to the home in our mind's eye.

     Sally's work could best be described as a product of her environment. Her children and her surroundings become her subjects, and are captured in watercolour or oil as snapshots of the subtle, memorable  moments of life. Her children are painted as children and not as models, and her backdrops are presented as familiar faces rather than technical necessities. The environment she is painting is her sense of home, and viewers are invited in.

     By choosing comfortable subjects, and capturing the raw mood by not encumbering these subjects with detail, Sally Chupick reaches a sense of melancholic intangibility that allows one to superimpose their own memories into the artwork. We found this special quality best demonstrated in her works "Paddling" and "Hula Hoop" (centre) and "Kindred Spirits" (cover), which timelessly present childhood exploration as it is, and as it was for most of us.

     You'll find Sally Chupick depicting many of Kingston's favorite places with this same welcoming brush. Outdoor landmarks such as the RMC campus, Artisan's Alley or City Hall are matched with indoor hotspots such as the Chez Piggy (centre), Morrison's or Windmills.

    Sally's landscapes are rich in colour and texture, and local in feel; while they   also appear to carry some of  that same sense of exploration and adventurism that we see in her paintings of children. Indoors, outdoors, city or countryside, Sally reaches out and brings her subjects home.

     So if you find yourself drawn to a painting that fills you with a strong, melancholic sense of home, and pages from earlier chapters in your life are brought front and centre, you just may be experiencing the Kingston Effect, courtesy of Sally Chupick.

You'll find many of Sally's paintings at Kingston Frame Works, 198 Princess St., where Jaywalker first found them several months ago. You may also find her there, too, as this is also her workplace, where she loves consulting customers on framing their artworks.

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