This web site features the art of Live Event Painter Jeremy Sutton.
This portrait was created by hand in a single sitting from direct observation. The paint media used was digital paint which was then printed onto canvas and acrylic gel and paint was applied. Thanks, Andrius, for being such a great portrait subject!
This portrait is of the inspirational and legendary dancer, singer and cabaret artiste Dawn Hampton, who performed with artists such as Cab Calloway and Bette Midler, and inspired Lindy Hop dancers all over the world through her teaching of musicality. Learn more about Dawn and her incredible family of musicians in the documentary “The Unforgettable Hampton Family”. This painting depicts Dawn dressed up for one of the theme nights at the Herrang Dance Camp in Sweden in 2008. The painting was displayed as part of Dawn’s 82nd birthday celebrations in San Francisco, June, 2010. Sadly Dawn just passed September 25th, 2016. She will be greatly missed.
At that same Herrang dance camp in 2008, Dawn sat for a 3 minute portrait I created as a live painting performance, “Happy Feet, Happy Paint”, during the weekly Herrang cabaret evening. Even in sitting she shows her humor, spirit and musicality! Enjoy the video:
Here are some details of the painted canvas:
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.
“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:
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…
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
Big thank you to Sarah who helped prepare the studio and the refreshments (even arranging
the cheeses to look like the Golden Gate Bridge!)
This painting depicts a vibrant, exciting, bustling evening in the Mid-Market theater district of San Francisco. It features three of the magnificent art-deco style theaters that this area of the city is home to: the Warfield, the Golden Gate and the Orpheum. The Warfield Theater was once a sister Fox theater to the stunning Fox San Francisco further up Market Street and the Fox Oakland across the Bay. My Fox Oakland painting, created to celebrate the reopening gala of the beautiful Fox Oakland, shows the positive impact of the lighting up of the glorious marquees above these historic theaters. The bill-board depicted in the painting shows the fabulous New Orlean’s trombonist Trombone Shorty.
I originally created this artwork in support of Proposition D which, though it did not pass, was intended to establish a new Mid-Market Sign District between Fifth and Seventh streets on Market Street in the center of San Francisco, allowing beautiful theater marquees, like that of the Golden Gate Theater and Warfield, and other signs in that area, to spring to life once again. For those not familiar with San Francisco, these two blocks, which once were a popular destination, have unfortunately been for many years a sad blight, full of abandoned properties, boarded up store fronts and the homeless living on the streets. Thankfully that situation is now slowly turning around, as I mention below. When I taught a Painter workshop at the Ramada Plaza Hotel (now the Whitcomb Hotel) on Market and Eighth in 2003, the wife of one of my students, on her first visit to San Francisco, walked along this section of Market Street and felt so threatened she daren’t go out again on her own the rest of the week.
As I explained above, I created this painting back in 2009 to depict the vision of a vibrant, exciting, bustling evening in the Mid-Market theater district of San Francisco. It was my hope that that neighborhood would be able to return to the elegance and vibrancy that historically it once embodied. Now, seven years later, in 2016, that transformation in the Mid-Market district is slowly happening. Thus when ArtspanSF sent me the #SFPublicCanvas call for art relating to the question of “How can we build a future for the Market/Tenderloin neighborhood that addresses the issues facing the area today?” I thought immediately of this artwork. #SFPublicCanvas is a large scale public performance event planned for June 16-19, 2016. Projection art will be displayed on the exterior of Hastings College of the Law on Golden Gate Ave, serving as an environment for a vertical dance performance by Bandaloop, with aspects of the animation triggering, and being triggered by, the performers. The “canvas” for the performance will be a video projection of compiled art submissions that reflect the community’s hopes and aspirations for the future of the Mid-Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods. Sounds like it’ll be a very cool event! This painting was originally created using Corel Painter and a Wacom pen tablet on a Mac. It was then printed on canvas and acrylic paint was added. The fact it bridges digital and non-digital media seems to fit with the digital / non-digital contrasts of the Mid-Market neighborhood as tech companies rub shoulders with traditional art stores and theaters; and tech workers, tourists, residents and the homeless all pass each other on the street.
Location photos were taken by Peggy Gyulai.
* To purchase the original painting please either call 415-641-1221 or email jeremy@jeremysutton.com.
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.
“Marge in Key West”, 2014, iPad Air + Art Rage + Pencil by 53
This sketch was created from life.
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:
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.
David Hockney is one of the greatest and most well-known living British artists. To learn more about him also see 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, this exhibition and current exhibitions, please see these links:
David Hockney 25 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.
David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) at the Lightroom, London.
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. (trailer 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
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)
“Wow! Wow! and more Wow! It is lovely. Thank you so much for all your hard work. We love it.
Thanks for doing it for us. It is truly a magical capture of our day and will have pride of place on the wall.
Kind regards, Nicky and Steve xx”
Congratulations Nicky and Steve! In this panorama collage painting I have visually woven together the story of your special day, starting with the ceremony in the magnificent and historical San Francisco City Hall, continuing with the amazing cable car tour and rounding it off with your first dance in the Fairmont Hotel.
I was so inspired by the beauty of your ceremony on the balcony in the magnificent San Francisco City Hall Rotunda that I decided to use the panorama of that scene as the backdrop for the painting. Your hand-written vows are included throughout the painting, as you can see in some of the artwork details below.
