I'm going to start by telling you a bit about June but this post is all about my love of a painting that June created a few years ago. Perhaps one of the most iconic paintings to come through the gallery. It lives in the back of my mind as an example of pure perfection in art.
June Stratton (b. 1959, Honolulu) is a contemporary figurative painter whose work blends tightly rendered oil portraiture with handmade plaster casts and gold leaf to create layered, tactile canvases that read as both intimate portrait and ritual object. June, now based in Savannah, has built a recognizable visual vocabulary: cool, luminous skin tones and carefully observed faces set against textured, sometimes gilded surfaces formed from casts of natural objects and found materials. Her technique and materials are central to how she “sets” a subject in a kind of mythic, domestic theater.
That brings us to Hickory Reckoning, the pieces that crystalizes all June has been honing her skills to create. The painting is a large-scale, mixed-material panel incorporating oil, plaster, and gold leaf. The gold application and three-dimensional plaster work integrated into the surface is done with perfect restraint. There's not to much or too little.
Visually, Hickory Reckoning centers on a young woman holding an axe casually across her shoulder; her hand and parts of her face are smeared with blood. The figure is represented with careful realism—delicate features, lifelike skin—and is juxtaposed against decorative, gold-leafed elements that pick out floral or cast ornament across her clothing and the surrounding surface. In close-up images and gallery detail shots you can really see the emphasize in the little glints of gold, the tactile plaster casts (often leafed or painted), and June’s precise oil painting of flesh and hair. The overall effect is deliberately ambivalent: beauty and violence, tenderness and something like vengeance, sit together in a single frame.
A Fictitious Superhero Emerges
June herself characterizes this work not simply as a literal reenactment of the play (I'll get to that) but as a symbolic figure. She wrote of Hickory Reckoning a telling sentence: “My fictitious super hero who protects those who have been harmed.” That phrasing is useful when reading the piece: the axe (a historically violent object) becomes a badge of agency; gold leaf transforms the domestic moment into iconography; the plaster casts evoke relic or armor rather than mere decoration.
June has said that Hickory Reckoning is loosely based on Susan Glaspell’s one-act play Trifles (1916). Trifles—and Glaspell’s related short story A Jury of Her Peers—were themselves born from a real, notorious Iowa case: the 1900 murder of John Hossack and the subsequent arrest and trial of his wife, Margaret (coverage which Susan Glaspell reported on as a young journalist). In Glaspell’s fictional retelling, the story of an isolated woman accused of killing her husband becomes an exploration of gender, empathy, and what counts as evidence. June’s painting picks up many of those themes (isolation, domestic cruelty, the small things that tell a larger truth) and reframes them as an act of empowerment or protection—hence the idea of a woman as avenger, guardian, or “superhero.”
Technique, materials, and why they matter here
June’s signature process, oil paint layered over handmade plaster casts and finished with gold leaf, does more than create surface interest. The plaster casts (made from organic forms or objects collected near her studio) bring literal, tactile traces of the natural world into the painting’s field; when gilded they suggest relics, tokens, or talismans. Oil modeling gives the protagonist corporeal immediacy; gold accents lift parts of the composition into symbolic light. The interplay of tactile, three-dimensional relief and strict representational painting turns the domestic figure into both portrait and shrine. She explained that integrating casts requires meticulous planning and that certain paintings are among her most emotionally intense works.
Reading Hickory Reckoning: violence, sympathy, and narrative inversion
There are several narrative moves the painting makes that are worth unpacking:
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Violence as agency: In the original Hossack/Glaspell material the deed is a legal and moral puzzle. June puts the weapon openly in the woman’s hand/over her shoulder—no furtive hiding. The pose reads like a prepared stance, an assertion rather than a panic, which reframes the act as purposeful rather than purely criminal.
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Blood as story: The smeared blood on hand and face is not gratuitous gore; it functions as narrative shorthand—this woman has been involved in bloodshed, but the painting refuses to reduce her to guilt alone. Instead, blood becomes a visible record of trauma and response.
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Gold as sanctification: The gold leaf elevates rather than beautifies: it sacralizes the figure, placing her in a longer lineage of painted icons and martyrdom portraits. The old visual language of gilding is pressed into service to make a contemporary moral argument—that this woman’s action might be moral defense, protective violence, or the hard truth of survival.
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Three-dimensional casts as evidence: The plaster cast fragments embedded around her function like clues or reliquaries; they bring the world of the kitchen, the yard, the household, physically into the painting—much as Glaspell’s women find evidence in the “trifles” of the domestic sphere. (Stratton’s method of casting and gilding those fragments literalizes the play’s insistence that small objects hold big stories.)
Why I'm Obsessed With This Painting
Hickory Reckoning has been shown and discussed more than any other work in the gallery. Years after selling it still comes up in conversation and did just yesterday again, which prompted me to make this post today. The painting was included in June's last solo show and was singled out in gallery copy and interviews as a notably dark and talked-about work in that body of work. June has exhibited widely: her work has been included in museum exhibitions such as MEAM (Barcelona) and featured in publications including American Art Collector; she held a solo exhibition at our gallery (Robert Lange Studios) in Spring 2023—context that places Hickory Reckoning within an international contemporary-figurative conversation even as it mines American literary and legal history. It's just that epic of a painting.
Why this painting resonates now
There are a few reasons Hickory Reckoning lands strongly for contemporary viewers. First, it reframes a historical (and still raw) question—when does an act of violence become an act of survival, revenge, or protection? Second, June’s technique collapses the boundary between ornament and evidence, making the painting itself feel like an archive. Third, by treating the central woman as a “superhero” figure (her words but I totally agree), the painting participates in a modern mythology that seeks female agency in places literature and law have historically marginalized. That combination of craft, narrative, and moral ambiguity is precisely why the work sparks conversation: it refuses easy judgment and asks viewers to look at small domestic facts the way Glaspell’s women did—closely, empathetically, and with a different set of priorities than a courtroom might have.
Where to see more and what is next
There is an interview in which June discussed the emotional difficulties and planning behind such a piece CLICK HERE. And please save the date for June's next solo show in March 2026. To view available paintings CLICK HERE.
