Caran D’Ache Neocolor II Aquarelle on Canson Mi-Teintes pastel paper, 12″ x 16″
This portrait was created from life. Here are two photos (below) by Elsa’s Mom, MJ:
Thanks for sitting, Elsa.
Elsa
The Golden Gate Bridge at 75 Soirée
“The Golden Gate Bridge”
2012
120″ wide x 84″ high, mixed media on canvas
Created in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge
Unveiled at the
GGB75 Soirée
May 26th, 2012
The Painting “The Golden Gate Bridge”
This painting is a tribute to the vision, determination, skill and sacrifice of the many people we have to thank for this magnificent icon. In the lower left corner of the painting you will see the faces of five important players in the creation of the bridge. From left to right:
- Joseph Baermann Strauss, Chief Engineer, who doggedly pursued the idea of building a Golden Gate Bridge after being asked in 1917 to offer a proposal by city engineer Michael M. O’Shaughnessy, and eventually saw it through to completion.
- Amadeo Peter Giannini, financial guarantor whose Bank of America bought $6 million in bonds in 1932, without which the project would probably have never got off the ground.
- Irving F. Morrow, consulting architect with is wife Getrude C. Morrow (they replaced the initial consulting architect John Eberson) and who, building on Eberson’s initial design and in close consultation with assistant engineer Clifford Paine, was responsible for the beautiful Art Deco styling. Irving Morrow lobbied successfully for the distinctive International Orange color.
- Charles Ellis, key engineering expert who undertook many of the complex design calculations (they filled ten volumes).
- Leon Moissieff, designer of the NY Manhattan Bridge, who contributed force calculations and worked closely with Ellis.
The workers who toiled above and below the treacherous waters are represented in the mid-left section of the painting. Throughout the artwork are newspaper clippings from the San Francisco Chronicle published on May 27th, 1937, the day the bridge was opened to the public, and the subsequent two days. The opening of the bridge was accompanied by a parade and a city-wide “Fiesta” featuring multiple celebrations, events and venues. The Fiesta program is included in the artwork. There is much else besides which I’ll be happy to point out when you visit…
This painting, which prominently features the Golden Gate Bridge, is on display at Sutton Studios & Gallery in a unique 36″ x 60″ luminescent LED Light Panel presentation kindly loaned by TaDah Corporation, as well as the original mixed media collage on canvas.
New series of Sumi-e ink paintings inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge, painted on 19″ x 24″ fine art paper prints of original pages from the San Francisco Chronicle at the time of the bridge opening. Besides being inspired by the Golden Gate Bridge, the series of Sumi-e brush paintings were also inspired by a number of other influences, first and foremost by my Zen calligraphy teacher, Sarah Moate sensei, who studied under the late Zen master calligrapher Terayama Tanchu Sensei, and also by the art of Jung Woong Lee and Robert Motherwell.
Historical program presented by Peter Moylan on the fascinating story behind the building of the bridge
Included in the GGB75 Soiréee was Peter’s telling, with slides, of the epic saga of the greatest theoreticians and designers of bridge building, fearless engineers and construction workers, and dedicated political and civic leaders, all led by a visionary with a desire for a monumental achievement of a lifetime, to build the Golden Gate Bridge.
Bridge historian Peter Moylan told this story in a unique combination of documentary narrative and storytelling that captures the dramatic events and personal sacrifices of those whose faith in the future and the value of progress overcame vast challenges of finances, politics, and engineering to create one of the world’s greatest icons.
Peter has been a student of San Francisco history for 36 years. He has also been a participant in civic and political events. He currently operates San Francisco Walks and Talks, offering the only walking tours that tell the entire history of San Francisco from native American village to the City we know today. I highly recommend arriving at the GGB75 Soirée before 7:30pm so you can enjoy his fascinating presentation.
May 26th is also a special Lindy Hop swing dance anniversary: Frankie Manning’s 98th Birthday
The day before the Golden Gate Bridge opened, and across the continent in New York City, a talented young dancer, Frankie Manning, was celebrating his 23rd birthday. While the Golden Gate Bridge Fiesta weekend was in full swing in San Francisco, it is likely that Frankie was pioneering innovative Lindy Hop air moves on the dance floor of the legendary Savoy Ballroom to the live music of big bands like the Count Basie Orchestra. Frankie, who performed internationally with the famous Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers and appeared in films like A Day at the Races and Helzapoppin’, subsequently served in the Army in World War II and fought in the Pacific, worked in the United States Post Office for over thirty years, and in his 70s started teaching Lindy Hop around the world, becoming the Ambassador of Swing to new generations of dancers. I took my very first Lindy Hop lesson from Frankie in 1995 and was inspired by his incredible joy, spirit and energy. He continued dancing and teaching until we sadly lost him age 94. May 26th would have been his 98th birthday and in Frankie’s honor my portrait of him was displayed at the GGB75 Soirée and some of his favorite tunes from the same era of the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge were played.
Big thank you to the Sponsors & Contributors whose generosity has made this event possible
- Peter Moylan for contributing his time and sharing his deep knowledge on this fascinating topic!
- SuperColor Digital for donating the monumental canvas printing
- TaDah Corp for loaning their fabulous LED Light Panels
- SF Teatime / The British Grocery for their delicious contributions to the refreshments
- Vinfolio for donating a top notch wine to the drawing
- SFMade for donating SFMade T-shirts with their distinctive logo that features the Golden Gate Bridge
- Golden Gate Bridge Furniture Company for bringing along examples of their furniture made of metal from the actual bridge (yes, there will indeed be real pieces of the bridge in the studio!)
Big thank you to Sarah who helped prepare the studio and the refreshments (even arranging
the cheeses to look like the Golden Gate Bridge!)
Misty Waterfall at Guangzhou
2009
24″ by 36″, acrylic and pigment ink on canvas
This painting was inspired by a photograph I took in GuangZhou, China. The chop (red stamp) on the upper left is my name phonetically recreated in ancient Chinese characters. The poem on the lower right is inscribed in the rock next to the waterfall and means, roughly, a good friend is never distant.
Drawing of Joe
“Joe”, 2014, 9″ x 9″, 2B Grumbacher Pentalic Woodless Pencil on Fabriano CFM Ingres 90 gsm acid free paper
This drawing is a result of simple pleasures: sitting outside in the Coffee Bar patio one morning with an excellent caffe latte while sketching my good friend Joe. The simple pleasure of making a sketch from direct observation of a subject, as a opposed to drawing from a photograph, cannot be underestimated. It’s something I encourage everyone to do! In this case part of the pleasure was leaving lots of empty space on the page and deciding when enough was enough…
January, 2014
Drawing of David Rubinger
“David Rubinger”, 2014, 9″ x 9″, 2B Grumbacher Pentalic Woodless Pencil on Fabriano CFM Ingres 90 gsm acid free paper
I was recently invited to teach at the FOTOfusion 2014 conference at the Palm Beach Photographic Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. As I walked into the exhibition area on the first evening I was stopped in my tracks by an incredibly moving, personal and powerful set of photographs on display, “My Eye on Israel” by David Rubinger (available as a beautiful coffee-table book and as an iBook which includes videos). I had the great pleasure of meeting David and then drawing him. The finished drawing is shown here (above) plus some documentation of the process (below).
As I walked around the exhibition of David’s photographs one in particular seemed very familiar: the photograph of the bloodied song sheet with the “Song for Peace” that assassinated Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin had just sung and was in his pocket when he was shot. David photographed it the next morning. It was that photograph that had led me to create my portrait of Rabin back in 1996.
January, 2014
Marge in Key West
“Marge in Key West”, 2014, iPad Air + Art Rage + Pencil by 53
This sketch was created from life.
Looking Out
“Looking Out”, 2014, 24″ x 24″, pigment ink and acrylic on canvas
This painting depicts looking out on the beautiful Prinsengracht. It is inspired by my recent visit to Amsterdam where looking in and out of windows is a big thing! People in The Netherlands tend not to have the ubiquitous privacy-protecting “net curtains” I grew up with in London. Instead, as I understand the Dutch history (and any Dutch readers please correct me on this), the culture was to show one’s possessions through your windows as a means of establishing status and showing the attributes of wealth. As much as folks like to look in at windows, it is just as interesting when your room overlooks a canal, such as in the old center of Amsterdam, to look out at life going by. People walk and cycle much more in the Netherlands than in America and probably than in most other places in the world, and this activity on the streets makes looking out of a window all the more fascinating.
For those interested in media, process and technique, this painting, my first of 2014, was created entirely using Corel Painter X3 on an iMac with a Wacom Intuos5 M pen tablet. I used this painting as an exploratory playground for going through and reminding myself of all fifty Impasto brushes in Painter. The Impasto brushes are designed emulate the effect of applying thick paint on your canvas. The process of creating this painting will be the subject of this month’s video tutorial here on PaintboxTV.com.
I really enjoyed painting the scene through the window. I treated each window pane as a mini-painting and used different combinations of brushes in each.
My artistic inspirations for this painting were primarily the thick ‘impasto’ painting technique of Vincent van Gogh and the focus on pattern, shape and design of some of Henri Matisse’s work. I was also inspired by van Gogh and Matisse’s marvelous bold expressive color and use of outline, and David Hockney’s approach to widening your vantage point and getting away from one point perspective.
If you’d like to see another painting also inspired by my recent Amsterdam visit, please see “Amsterdam Canal”.
January 1, 2014
Amsterdam Canal
“Amsterdam Canal”, 2013, 40″ x 26″, pigment ink and acrylic on canvas
This painting was created as part of a tutorial titles “Thick Paint: Inspired by Van Gogh” which you’ll find in the Painter X3 In-Depth section on this site. I love the vistas in Amsterdam as you look down the canals at the bustling life where bicycles, house boats, tall houses and, at this time of the year, beautiful golden leaves, all vie for attention!
Another painting also inspired by my recent visit to Amsterdam is “Looking Out”.
December, 2013
Sublime Jazz
“Sublime Jazz”, 40″ x 26″, pigment print and acrylic on canvas, 2013
This painting was created as part of my creativeLIVE Intro to Photo Painting: A Creative Approach Using Corel Painter X3 workshop. My inspiration was a photograph (below) that I took of Gwenda and David dancing to the music of the Danny Brown Trio at Bruno’s Pizzeria Cucina on the Fillmore during the Fillmore Vintage Couture Ball. I love the way that Gwenda and David were lost in their own world as they moved to the sublime jazz… hence the title of the painting. Thanks to the Danny Brown Trio, Gwenda (of ArtAmbassador.net) and Dave for their unwitting inspiration!
Original source photo
Start of the digital painting on the set of creativeLIVE
Post-print painting on the set of creativeLIVE
November 12, 2013
David and Gwenda dancing in front of painting at the Verdi Club, San Francisco, March 2015
David, Gwenda and I in front of painting at the Verdi Club, San Francisco, March 2015
Live iPad Painting at Opening of
David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition
de Young Museum, San Francisco
Performing live iPad portrait sketching at the opening (October 25th, 2013) of the historic and epic “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition”, the largest exhibition ever at the de Young Museum, and the biggest exhibition of Hockney’s art in the United States since 2005. (Photo: Stephen Somerstein)
The two iPad drawings shown above were inspired David Hockney’s work iPad drawings in the de Young show. Both these drawings were both created in the exhibition using the Sketch Club app with the Adonit Jot Touch stylus. The first one, which I spent about two hours on, was based on the replay video video showing Hockney’s process of building up a painting from start to finish. Every time I looked up I saw a different stage of the painting which made an interesting subject changing with time. Thank you Robert for kindly taking the video of me painting. By contrast the second one was created in the last ten minutes of the show, sitting in front of one of Hockney’s large scale iPad prints. The guards almost had to push me out of the gallery! The inspirations for both of these were from paintings that were part of Hockney’s ensemble of works entitled “The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (Twenty Eleven) Version 3, 2011-2013”.
I taught two show related iPad art workshops, “Paint on the Go! Inspired by Hockney”. The workshops drew upon ideas, themes and inspiration from the show, and included a guided tour of the Hockney show in which I highlighted the lessons we can learn from Hockney in the context of drawing and painting on your iPad. We then applied these artistic and thematic lessons to painting in the exhibition itself, much to the fascination of onlookers, as you can see from the photo below show student Henk Dawson painting in the show:
About Hockney and the “Bigger Exhibition”
It was visiting the “Bigger Picture” David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, January 2012, and experiencing the impact of his large iPad paintings, as well as video replays of his iPad paintings, on display in such a traditional environment that kick-started my exploration in earnest of using the iPad as a serious fine art tool, after twenty years of digital painting on the iPad’s big brother, the Macintosh computer. Besides the opening of the Hockney show at the de Young Museum, I’ve subsequently performed live iPad painting at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s America Now! Innovation in Art event; at the Seoul Museum of Art as part of their Digifun Mobile Art Festival; at the flagship Apple Stores in Regent Street, London, and in San Francisco; at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University; at the SIGGRAPH Studio in Anaheim; at SEMA, the worlds largest custom car trade show in Las Vegas; as well as at other private and public events. You can see some of my iPad artwork at https://jeremysutton.com/ipad-mobile-art.
David Hockney is one of the greatest and most well-known living British artists. To see examples of his work and learn more about him see HockneyPictures.com, the Artsy Hockney page and his Wikipedia entry. His work has spanned a wide range of media, subjects, styles, points of view and size. Over the years he has worked with oils and acrylics on canvas, pencil, charcoal and watercolor on paper, color xerography, photographic collage (“joiners”), polaroids, multiple camera videos, and digital painting on his computer (Quantel Paintbox, TimeArts Oasis and Adobe Photoshop with Wacom tablet), iPhone and iPad (Brushes app), including synchronized digital video replays of his iPad drawings. His subjects have ranged from the iconic Los Angeles swimming pools to portraits and figures of himself, his family and friends, as well as interiors, still life studies and landscapes. The paintings you see at the top of this page are, on the left, an iPad self-portrait of Hockney and his iPad, and on the right, a plein air iPad painting of woods in Yorkshire. His style has varied from natural color high realism to non-natural color (with a tip of the hat to Fauves like Henri Matisse). His exploration of depicting the moving and ever-changing three dimensional world in static two dimensional artworks (with the exception of his video installations) has included juxtaposing and arranging multiple images into single artworks, making series of works of the same subject over time and seasons (in the spirit of Claude Monet), and taking themes and subjects and abstracting from them in series of works (such as his series based on Claude Lorrain’s “The Sermon on the Mount” with cubist inspiration from Pablo Picasso). He has pushed the boundaries of the size of his paintings, both traditional and digital, working on larger and larger artworks, many divided up into multiple canvases on a grid system. The “Bigger Exhibition” at the de Young Museum was a historic review of the work he created over the last decade, since the completion of his book “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters”. It included huge prints of his iPad drawings and fascinating replays on screens showing his process and actual brush strokes. His example encouraged everyone to be free, take risks, look intently, draw from life and seek to express multiple vantage points in our work.
To learn more about Hockney and the exhibition please see these links:
Love Life: David Hockney’s Timescapes – talk by Lawrence Weschler at the de Young on October 26, 2013 – de Young Museum YouTube channel. Excellent overview talk. (video)
David Hockney 2009, A Bigger Picture – BBC presentation of Bruno Wollheim’s documentary on Hockney’s preparation for the Bigger Picture show at the Royal Academy, London. Great insights into Hockney’s working methods. Shows him in action. (video)
David Hockney – Painting The Tunnel – excerpt from the bonus material that came with Wollheim’s documentary, re-edited by Anna Rusbatch. Shows the progress and process of Hockney painting a single plein air painting. (video)
Art review, Hockney at the de Young: changed views – San Francisco Chronicle
How David Hockney Became the World’s Foremost iPad Painter – Wired magazine
iPad art gains recognition in new Hockney exhibit – AP exhibition review
David Hockney — bigger, bolder, brighter, digitized – San Jose Mercury News
Artist David Hockney’s iPad and iPhone artwork goes on display at the de Young Museum – San Jose Mercury News
iPad art gains recognition in new Hockney exhibit – York Daily Record
He’s Back, in a Defiant Blaze of Color – New York Times
iPad art gains recognition in new Hockney exhibit – Yahoo News
Pop Art Legend’s iPad Ingenuity – Associated Press (video)