sunday night movies
drawn & quarterly, 2013
96 pages
Sunday Night Movies features Shapton's watercolors of resonant moments in black-and-white cinema. Selecting a brief fragment of each chosen film, she creates an indelible image that is both a hand-painted movie still and a personal response to a fleeting celluloid moment.
Together, the seventy-eight paintings create a valentine to the world of cinema. Shapton's journey through film history becomes a wistful celebration of the subtle moments in stories, which can often slip by unnoticed. What could be a simple title, still life, or portrait of an actor becomes both illusive and allusive through the medium of these personal paintings.
“Sunday Night Movies is... an arresting series of watercolors... the paintings are suffused with a kind of rosy light: bright whites, celluloid blackness, a celestial gray haze... It is a soft light, the kind you shine on something you love.” - Bookworm