Annette & Hanson’s Wedding Day Collage

Double Happiness

2012

Pigment ink and acrylic on canvas, 62″ x 20″

“Working with Jeremy was an absolute pleasure. His work is outstanding and his service and attention to detail was absolutely AMAZING. Hanson and Annette were blown away by the artwork that Jeremy framed and delivered to them. They said that they had never seen anything like it. We feel that working with Jeremy and gifting this to our great friend and mentor in the photography industry was the BEST gift we could ever give. If you want some thing over the top custom and fabulous Jeremy Sutton and his fabulous smile and master craftsmanship are definitely the way to go.”

Mary Fisk-Taylor, M. photog., Cr., CPP, ABI, API

Hayes & Fisk the Art of Photography

“Wow! That is very cool! That is different and unique. As a professional photographer I have seen a lot of things and I have never seen anything like that. I love the dance and the shuāngxǐ – Double Happiness. That’s absolutely gorgeous.”

Hanson Fong

I recently had the pleasure and honor of being commissioned by Mary and Jamie to create a very special wedding present, a Wedding Day Collage Painting, for their good friends, world-renowned wedding photographer and international instructor Hanson and Annette. The painting encompasses and captures the significant moments and symbols of their wedding day, including the beautiful and touching tea ceremony with their mothers, their wedding cake and flowers that Annette designed, the bamboo that Hanson arranged, the table settings of their family table no. 2, their first dance, and the Double Happiness Chinese character. It was a great joy to see the expression of surprise and pleasure on their faces when they first saw the painting! They loved it!

I shall be using this artwork as one of the examples in my new Painter Collage Techniques DVD.

Jeremy, Annette and Hanson with painting just after the unveiling (photo by Peggy Gyulai)

Hanson and Annette enjoying the painting after hanging it on their wall

The Tea Ceremony with their mothers

Table setting of the family table No. 2

The shuāngxǐ or Double Happiness character symbolizes the joy and harmony of the wedding couple

Jeremy

January 25, 2013

September 14, 2012November 21, 2015

Matisse Performance

Jeremy Sutton as Henri Matisse

Tableau Vivant at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, Sept. 14, 2012

In celebration of the opening of the exhibition “William S. Paley Collection: A Taste for Modernism” at the de Young Museum I portrayed the great French artist Henri Matisse in a tableau vivant (September, 2012). During the performance I drew, painted with sumi-e ink, gouache and acrylic paints, sculpted in clay and cut and glued paper cutouts.

Photo by Laura Wuest

Photo by Ken Watanabe

Photo by Laura Wuest

Photo by Marissa Teal

Jeremy as Henri Matisse, Peggy as Mary Cassatt ~ Photo by Marissa Teal

Jeremy as Henri Matisse, Peggy as Mary Cassatt ~ Photo by Laura Wuest

Peggy as Mary Cassatt ~ Photo by Laura Wuest

Thank you to Lorena for so kindly being my excellent Matisse model for this performance.

The rimless eye glasses you see me wearing in this tableau were kindly loaned by the Optical Underground.

September 11, 2011November 21, 2015

Picasso Performance

Man with a Guitar (after Picasso)

Created during tableau vivant portrayal of

Pablo Picasso at the de Young Museum

2011

30″ x 40″ mixed media on canvas

This portrait of Flamenco guitarist Ryan Kelly Garcia was created as part of my tableau vivant portrayal of Pablo Picasso at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, September, 2011. My performance was part of the de Young’s Friday Night Cultural Encounter, a free public event, themed to celebrate the excellent special exhibition, Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris. My painting is inspired by, and named after, one of the paintings in the show—Homme a la guitare (Man with a Guitar), a painting Picasso completed in the Fall of 1911 in Paris as he was in the midst of his cubist experiments with his friend and fellow artist Georges Braque.

Here are photos from the performance at the de Young:

I am fascinated and inspired by the passionate and fearless intensity of Picasso’s art making—always experimenting, pushing, prodding, borrowing, branching and growing. He was ever ready to destroy and transform, never attached to or precious about his marks and his media.

This summer in London I painted a portrait of a friend, Robert, who, as a child in the south of France, spent a whole summer watching Picasso paint directly onto glass panels for the window of a church. He literally looked up at Picasso’s intense gaze as he worked. He said Picasso’s incredible intensity and concentration was undiminished over many hours, each day throughout the summer. At the end of the summer Robert was in the shop in the church and wanted to get a Picasso print for his parents but couldn’t afford anything. Then a voice said “Let him have it!” It was Picasso, who then signed the print for him.

In 1993 I created a portrait of Picasso, which was published in the National Association for Desktop Publishing Journal and subsequently, in 2010, was displayed in the San Jose Repertory Theater when they performed “A Picasso”. At Oxford University, while studying Physics (and art), I performed at the Oxford Playhouse in “Desire Caught by the Tail”, one of the only two full-length plays that Picasso wrote.

Here are Man with a Guitar preparative studies, each 9 x 12 inches, made with various dry media such as charcoal, pencil, ink and collage on paper:

Here are some more photos from the tableau vivant performance showing the creation of a portrait titled “Le Canard”. This portrait was inspired by Picasso’s paintings of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter (portrayed at the museum by Peggy Gyulai). The title of the portrait is based on the newspaper cutting pasted in the upper left corner of the painting. The cutting is from the masthead of the historic French satirical newspaper “LeCanard-Enchaine” (“The Chained Duck”)which was founded in 1915 and which Picasso was sure to have read.

A third artwork I worked on at the museum was a mixed media collage titled “Still Life with Flowers, Guitar and Jug.” This was inspired by Picasso’s collage “Bottle, Glass and Violin” (1913). The guitar I chose for this still life was a gourd African guitar, a nod to the strong influence of Africa artefacts in Picasso’s early works and in the development of cubism.

Here you see children who were watching me paint, sticking on a piece of newspaper at the end of the evening. They were fascinated by the performance and didn’t want it to end!

October 7, 2010March 19, 2018

Performance as Vincent Van Gogh
De Young Museum, October 2010

Sunflowers
2010
Pigment and acrylic on canvas , 30″ x 36 “

The artworks shown on this page are all inspired by artist Vincent van Gogh and were created as part of my tableau vivant portrayal of van Gogh at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, October, 2010, in celebration of the exhibition Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay. I prepared these artworks in my studio using digital paint (Corel Painter software on a Macintosh computer with a Wacom graphics tablet), output on canvas which I then painted on with acrylic paint in performance.

Portrait of Joe Talmadge

2010

36 inches wide by 23 inches high, acrylic and pigment ink on canvas

Joe sits for his portrait as I paint him at the de Young Museum

In preparation for the tableau vivant performance I started working digitally from life inn my studio using Corel Painter and a Wacom Cintiq 21UX tablet.

Portrait of Al Honig

2011

29 inches x 34 inches, pigment and acrylic on canvas

This portrait, also created as part of my van Gogh tableau vivant performance, is of sculptor Al Honig . This de Young Museum’s Friday Night Cultural Encounter Soirées was celebrating the exhibition Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Beyond: Post-Impressionist Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay. The photos that depict me painting Al are by Gil Rego, Jr., taken for the the SF Weekly, unless otherwise stated.

With the other Tableaux Vivants!

Myself as van Gogh, Dede Wilsey, President of the Board of Trustees of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Peggy as Berthe Morisot and John Buchanan, Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Mr. Buchanan sadly passed away on December 30, 2011. He achieved great things at the de Young and Legion of Honor Museums and made a significant contribution to the cultural richness of the San Francisco Bay Area. He will be sorely missed. Condolences to his family.

July 30, 2010November 21, 2015

Degas Performance

Performing as artist Edgar Degas in a historical “tableau vivant” at the de Young and Legion of Honor Museums, San Francisco, July, 2010. The painting you see me working on, Dance Rehearsal (shown below), is an original composition inspired by the compositional approach and style of Degas.

Video length: 1 minute 8 seconds

Dance Rehearsal

2010

32″ x 30″, pigment, acrylic and pastel on canvas

This painting is inspired by Edgar Degas’s wonderful paintings and drawings of dancers. It was created as part of my tableau vivant portrayal of Degas at the de Young and Legion of Honor Museums in celebration of the Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay and Impressionist Paris exhibitions. The painting and the dancers you see depicted are based on photos and sketches I made at The Ballet Studio and the Chamberdance (Academy of Ballet) in San Francisco. I performed with members of the Ballet School at the de Young Museum and with members of Chamberdance at the Legion of Honor Museum. This painting was the featured case study in my DVD-ROM Post-Print Painting The Sutton Way, now available as a download.

I am fascinated by Degas’ use of dramatic cropped imagery, his depictions of dancers in off-performance moments and the thoughtful construction of his compositions. I constructed the composition of this painting with the thought in mind of “how would Degas have portrayed these dancers?” That led me to include part of the piano accompanist and the teacher. It is not based on any single Degas work but more his overall approach to depicting his dancers. Degas experimented with different media and new technology, including photography, and would have loved the digital tools of today!

To learn more about the process of researching and developing this painting please read the article I wrote for the April 2011 issue of the Digital Paint Magazine.

Here are some photos of the Degas performances:

Renee, Peri and Nico, from the Academy of Ballet, being painted at the Legion of Honor Museum

Drawing Peri

Sketches of Peri and Nico

Drawing Nico

Drawing Renee

Sketch of Renee

Nico, Peri and Renee enjoying the artworks I just createdof them

Degas and his traveling art kit!

Sketching from the wings as Chamberdance perform in the Florence Gould Auditorium

Sketches of Chamberdance made from the side of the stage

The view from outside the de Young Museum (photographer Steven Somerstein) as I sketch Amanda and Mia

Sketches of Amanda and Max

Enchanté!

Talking with an enthusiastic audience:-)

Sketch of Mia

Painting dancers at the de Young Museum

One of the sketches made at the de Young

Drawing Joey

Here are close up shots of the final painting:

Acrylic paint applied with use of a painting knife onto thebow at the back of one dancer’s dress (above) and onto the swirling fabric of another dancer’s dress (below).

This section of the painting (above)shows where I used scumbling and glazing techniques.

Notice the difference in reflectivity between a region of the painting where I applied a gloss gel (above) versus a semi-gloss gel (below).

Thank you to Renee Baldocchi of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco for kindly inviting me to participate in these wonderful artistic collaborations at the de Young and the Legion of Honor Museums. Thank you to Renee’s colleagues at the museums, Cynthia and Andrea and the rest of the staff who helped make everything run so smoothly. Thanks to the fabulous dancers Mia, Amanda, Max (de Young, July 30), Peri, Renee, Nico and Chamberdance (Legion of Honor, August 1), Emily, Lisa, Rachel, Andrew, Pemberly and Joey (de Young, August 13), and all their teachers: Henry and Charles from the Ballet Studio and Richard, Zory and MaryEllen from the Academy of Ballet. A big thank you to Peggy who tirelessly helped me carry Degas’ not so light traveling art kit and kindly documented the whole creative process, as you can see from her wonderful photos shown here.

July 25, 2008November 21, 2015

Happy Feet, Happy Paint

3 minutes 27 seconds

Video of live painting performance, Happy Feet, Happy Paint

Herrang Dance Camp, Sweden

July 2008

Three minute portrait of Lindy Hop teacher, performer and inspirer Dawn Hampton created live in a cabaret at the Herrang Dance Camp, Sweden. I used improvised painting materials based on what was available in the camp workshop, which was house paint on board. The music is Opus No. 1, performed by Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra.

Video length: 3 minutes 27 seconds