Susan Jane Belton’s latest body of work represents something of a departure. She has turned away from the disposable coffee cups, fire hydrants, and traffic cones that for years occupied her gaze, and towards a subject that seems far more fraught: the human figure, with all the psychological and emotional baggage that term embodies. Alone or more often in groups, they pose for the camera, for these are immediately recognizable as paintings derived from snapshots, the kind preserved in family albums or piled into shoeboxes, mementos of a childhood vacation or the ghost of a dimly remembered relative.

                  Some of the shift is more apparent than real. Belton’s inanimate objects were always touchingly human, grouped companionably or starkly isolated, but always attuned to the hands that held them, the uses they served, to their place in the lived (and disposed of) environment. Conversely, there’s a sense of distance to these images, a feeling that we are at one or two removes from the faces that stare out at us, the bodies that pose awkwardly, the flow of time interrupted just long enough for the shutter to click. They are not traditional portraits in which the artist seeks to delve into the personality of the sitter. How could they be? The emotional spark that passed between the people in the image and the person who captured it happened years ago. Too much has been lost in the interval to ever be fully recovered.

Which is perhaps the point. Snapshots, like a discarded coffee cup or a group of traffic cones held together by police tape, are found objects: each of them carries its own history, an imprint of lives lived, of narratives indecipherable. Belton’s latest works are less an attempt to collapse the distance between then and now than to measure the loss that time imposes. They are wistful, meditative, suggestive but ultimately inscrutable. “Who are these people?” they seem to ask, without expecting an answer. Belton is more archeologist than memoirist, regarding these relics with curiosity, sympathy, but also with an almost clinical detachment. The very immediacy of the snapshot makes the inexorable flow of time more palpable, its ruptures more apparent.

As always, Belton is a master of the ordinary, eloquent in a distinctly American vernacular. She follows in the tradition of Edward Hopper, Fairfield Porter, Wayne Thiebaud, and AliceNeel; she never goes far afield in search of her subjects, certain that the stuff of everyday life is plenty rich enough. Indeed, she confirms, what is close at hand is what moves us most deeply.

Her technique is plain-spoken as well, direct, no-nonsense, undergirded by a keen visual intelligence. Whether depicting a few elderly women cooling off in the water, or an ancestor many years in the grave, Belton pares her subjects down to essentials, into broad masses of color and form that have their own abstract beauty. Hers is a world of stillness, petrified tableaux of sun-drenched summers and lazy afternoons. There is a kind of reticence, one that speaks in the silences, that must be read between the lines. This is very much in keeping with the Midwest,all-American childhood suggested in many of the paintings, of Little Leaguebaseball and close-cropped lawns in front of cookie-cutter houses.

“Write (or paint)what you know,” goes the old saying, but by exposing the false promise of intimacy, these latest works seem to ask another question: What do we really know, even about the people and the places closest to us? In the end— like the mundane, manufactured products that once occupied her thoughts and engaged her brush—these moments rescued from the flow of time refuse to yield up their secrets.

—Miles J Unger is the author of numerous books, including: A Fire in his Soul: Van Gogh, Paris and the Making of an Artist;  Picasso and the Painting that Shocked the World; and Michelangelo: A Life in SixMasterpieces. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times and the Economist magazine.