Our Secret Sadness, is a painting installation by Houston-based artist Terry Suprean, conjuring the sublime beauty that becomes fully visible during the final moments before the cessation of existence. While the visual experience of Suprean’s paintings is one of exquisite beauty the artist, known for drawing viewers in through the eye, fully engages our senses while conjuring one’s most essential and existential dread about the tenuous nature of these profound sensual pleasures.

Grown like sedimentary landscapes, Suprean’s works start with the artist manufacturing his own paints using non-traditional binders and pigments—often mineral based and sourced from the earth, to catalyze painting systems intimately linked to material and process. Installed in a formal configuration that recalls religious altarpieces, and informed by the images of the earth from the ASTER satellite, Suprean’s paintings deconstruct the standard depictions of landscape particular to western art history by embracing chance, evolutionary processes, and scientific method—introducing his own queer perspective on landscape to cultivate healing and collective mourning for what we will lose to climate change.

​

About the artist

Terry Suprean is an artist in Houston, TX.  Before graduating with an MFA in Studio Art from Texas Christian University, Suprean began playing in punk bands throughout the gulf-coast region and collaboratively developing activist communities in his hometown of New Orleans.  The artist moved into process-based generative art-making practices informed by his music and political activism, creating multi-arts platforms under the name Civic TV.  Initially less concerned with the aesthetics of his finished paintings that kept transforming well after being completed, Suprean has for the last two years allowed himself to create experiences of shameless beauty interwoven with his darker visions of our unredeemable environmental degradation. 
 

Bill Arning Exhibitions 

604 West Alabama 

Houston, TX 77006

​