Metro Pulse/Artbeat/Carl Sublett

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Octogenarian Carl Sublett is honored by UT

by Heather Joyner

When I wrote a Metro Pulse column about Carl Sublett's Bennett Galleries show in late 1997, I titled it "Local Hero." Now that Sublett has become the first person to win the UT School of Art's Distinguished Alumni Award, his stature both here and elsewhere has grown even more. As prolific and marvelously talented as the 81-year old Sublett is, the present honor is particularly fitting given his reputation for having been one of the University's most admired teachers. Art Department director Norman Magden says that the award (granted to either past students or faculty emeriti) "will provide to currently enrolled students a demonstration of the importance of a strong commitment to education in achieving professional success in the field of visual arts." That statement's a mouthful, but we get the drift. It's a way of saying, "if they can do it, kids, you can too." And Sublett himself has clearly "done it" in terms of artistic accomplishment.

Marking the award's inauguration, the Ewing Gallery's A Visual Odyssey: The Art of Carl Sublett examines one man's work throughout more than 40 years, and its Homeric reference is not as far-fetched as it might sound. Like Odysseus, Sublett has spent years wandering his world, however internal—searching out meaning and an expression for that meaning. He's said, "Each day begins with tangible or touchable things and gradually it becomes a little more imaginary or abstract. The intellectual part is part of your day as well—I must get it down on paper or canvas. [The resulting fragments are] like looking at a snowflake after you have seen the field of snow." Whether we are considering the subtlety of pieces like those in Sublett's "Kite Series" (employing pressed and punctured paper in shades of ivory and gray), or taking in his more representational paintings of monolithic seaside structures, we are treated to superb execution of insightful ideas.

Although the 50 displayed drawings, prints, and paintings (many of which have been inspired by summers in Port Clyde, Maine, Sublett's wife's birthplace) could be labeled either landscapes or abstractions, they're not always easy to categorize. In the terrific catalogue that accompanies the show, Dr. Donald Kurka (retired UT Art Department Head) puts it like this: "[Sublett's] thinking allows him to flow back and forth from the real and abstract without boundaries. This constant metamorphosis produces his wide range of styles." Kurka also writes, "A landscape, as any subject in the hands of a gifted artist, is ultimately a metaphor for the artist's view of himself and the world. A tree, rock, or sky can be painted in endless ways. The way these are depicted is the true subject of the painting."

I agree with Kurka. The well-worn maxim "it's not what you paint, but how you paint it" indeed brings Sublett to mind. One example is "Around Knoxville, 1980," a watercolor of an old house situated beneath a sky that's more about a fleeting fluidity and the layering of pigment than it is about place. Alluding to the act of painting, dried drips hover like arrested rain above the house and suggest that it, too, represents a specific moment that no longer exists. In fact, gestural surface always informs Sublett's implied or discernible imagery. The duality of illusionistic depth combined with evidence of the human hand is utterly captivating. Says Kurka of Sublett's '90's landscapes, "They conjure a scene sensed deep in one's memory rather than seen in cold reality—years of looking, feeling, thinking, and creating have been distilled and internalized to produce an essence of landscape."

Born in 1919 approximately three months after the end of the Great War, Sublett has experienced quite a lot in the years referred to above. And he's spent more than half a century with Helen, the woman he married and produced two children with. His rural beginnings in Eastern Kentucky, along with the love of a devoted partner, seem to have instilled in Sublett an unwavering trust in his individuality. Perhaps his self-knowledge and confidence is what has allowed him to experiment with so many artistic approaches and styles. Sublett's son Eric, also an artist, recalls being told by his father that the best results often come from the creative search. In his contribution to the catalogue, Eric remarks that his father was always receptive to whatever was around him. And Sublett's influences have been numerous, including years spent as an engineering draftsman and newspaper artist following World War II-era work in an airplane factory and Army service within a rifle company stationed in Italy. Says Eric, "[When] he was involved in industrial design, he picked up on blueprinting, template making, and fabricating containers, each of these finding its way into his abstractions. A career in what was then called 'commercial art' also added to his attitude toward the use of materials as well as to a keen understanding of visual composition and graphics."

Sublett's decades of teaching at UT started in the '50's and extended into the early '80's, a period that permitted him even more hours to paint outdoors or in the studio. According to Eric, his father's teaching technique "has some of the qualities of trout fishing. Effortlessly casting, patiently reeling in the sensibilities of the student. This is undoubtedly the core and kernel of the reason why my father has had so broad an influence as time goes by." That influence is well-celebrated by the Ewing and by another Sublett exhibit called Enduring Creativity, hosted by the Bennett Galleries (with an opening scheduled for Thursday, Dec. 7, from 5-8 p.m.). So step into the light as Sublett shines.