From Playboy Pinups to Egg Tempera: The Paintings of Suzannah Sinclair
Playboys, Wood Panels, and a Show About Women Looking at Women
I first came across Suzannah Sinclair twenty-some odd years ago. She was one of the hottest artists around, and she was doing something that made me genuinely uncomfortable in the best possible way. She was painting Playboy pinups on wood - gorgeous, seductive, complicated images of women - and she was a young female artist doing that, which somehow made it okay, and also somehow made it more unsettling. I was seduced by the wood. I was seduced by the paintings themselves. And then I got mad at myself for being seduced. And then I got over it and put her work in a show about women looking at women.
Suzannah and I lost touch over the years. Life got in the way. But here we are, two decades later, and I finally got her on camera. Twice, actually - the gremlins came for us the first time and we had to come back for round two. Worth it.
What I love about Susanna - what I've always loved - is that she will not perform being fine when she isn't. She'll tell you exactly how it is: the early buzz, the magazine covers, the galleries that eventually closed, the years of quiet, the question she got asked over and over after she had kids (do you still paint?), the $127 she made last year. She says all of it, without flinching, and without purely wallowing in it either - which is its own kind of skill.
How Playboy Became a Painting Practice
The paintings came from an unlikely place. A professor in undergrad asked her, pointedly, if she even knew how to draw. She took it seriously. Too shy to ask anyone to pose, and uninterested in the waif-y aesthetic dominating '90s fashion magazines, she found another way in: a friend's brothers had a collection of Playboys from the '60s and '70s. Bodies that looked like real bodies. She started painting from them to learn how to paint. That's it. That's the origin story. What followed - the critical attention, the gallery representation, the shows in New York and Scandinavia and beyond - grew out of a young woman just trying to figure out how to draw.
She stopped painting nudes eventually. The trolling started. The group shows she was being invited into stopped being about painting and started being about erotica, which isn't the same thing and she knew it. She said no to publications. She protected her mission, which she describes simply as wanting to be a sincere painter and a generous human - to translate the things that make her emotional into something that might connect to a collective feeling in someone else. Same goal she always had. Different subject matter.
Life in the Willy Wags: Maine, Egg Tempera, and a Ten-by-Twelve Studio
These days Susanna lives deep in rural Maine - two hours north of Skowhegan, closer to Canada than to anything most people would recognise as an art hub. She calls it the Willy Wags. She has two kids, a scientist husband, a studio that is ten by twelve feet and bursting with work from her entire career. She coaches Nordic skiing for children. She fills legal pads with words and thoughts before she picks up a brush. She makes egg tempera paintings of flowers, sunrises, her own life - small and luminous and deeply felt.
She also started a publishing imprint called Sinclair's Garage, producing open-edition artist books to the specifications of Printed Matter in New York. The first book is by her friend Jesse Littlefield, a painter whose secret Instagram of soft Maine observations became the source material. Each book includes a $5 add-to-cart donation to a cause the artist chooses. It's not a money-making venture. It's a way to talk to artists, do studio visits, and make things that can live in the world at an accessible price point. It's very Suzannah.
On Choices, Disappearances, and Being Asked If You Still Paint
What she'll tell you, if you ask - and I did ask, because I had to - is that yes, it surprises her that things unfolded the way they did. She made choices: left New York, had children, moved to the middle of nowhere by most people's standards. People told her both of those things would hurt her career. She chose them anyway because she was lonely in the city, genuinely lonely, in a way that no amount of sold-out shows could fix. And for a while, the art world simply forgot she existed. Curators who had shown her work asked if she still painted. She still painted.
There's no tidy resolution here, and she wouldn't want me to pretend there is. She's forty-five and ready for a rediscovery. She has the work - PDFs full of it, including large-scale pieces that deserve walls bigger than her daughter's closet, which her daughter would also like back. She's not bitter, exactly. Bitterness, she says, is like one of the umami senses - you need it, it's part of the flavour, but it's not the whole thing.
She's funny. She's sharp. She's made something of a life that doesn't look like what anyone told her a career should look like, and she's clear-eyed about what that has cost her and what it has given her. I think her work is a bit like a really good song - trying to evoke emotion, but also trying to record a time and a place. She agreed with that.
Go look at her work. It deserves to be seen, again.
Susanna Sinclair's paintings are available through studio enquiry. Her publishing imprint, Sinclair's Garage, produces open-edition artist books and can be found online.