This web site features the art of Live Event Painter Jeremy Sutton.
This sketch of Barry Bonds was created from life using my favorite water-soluble Caran d’Ache crayons on white cartridge paper. Thanks, Barry, for being a great portrait model!
2005, pigment ink and acrylic on canvas, 50″ x 30″
Other baseball legends I’ve created portraits of include Barry’s godfather Willie H. Mays, Jr., Jackie Robinson and Hank Greenberg.
Mayor “Sunny” Jim Rolph Jr.
2004, pigment ink and acrylic on canvas, 50″x 74″
This portrait of the longest serving Mayor of San Francisco, ‘Sunny’ Jim Rolph, is part of my Legendary San Francisco Mayors series. It commemorates the life of one of the longest serving mayors of San Francisco who oversaw the recovery of San Francisco following the great earthquake and fire of 1906. He was instrumental in San Francisco hosting the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), a world’s fair that celebrated the opening of the Panama Canal and the city’s post-earthquake reconstruction. The centennial of this exhibition is currently being celebrated at the de Young Museum with their exhibition Jewel City: Art from San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
2004, 34″ x 58″, pigment ink print with acrylic paint on canvas
This painting is inspired by the early music of the late great “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” Elvis Presley.
Yitzhak Rabin was an Israeli politician, statesman and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974–77 and 1992 until his assassination on November 4th, 1995.
The morning after Rabin was assassinated, I saw the stark image of a bloodied song sheet with a bullet hole through it on the front page of the newspaper, the European (I was in Brighton, England, for my sister’s wedding). The song was Shir Hashalom, Song for Peace, a peace song from the 60’s that Rabin had just joined in singing with the crowd at the peace rally in Tel Aviv immediately before he was killed. The song is a beautiful poem about peace.
The Song for Peace (sometimes referred to as the Song of Peace) was written by Jacob Rotblit, and is sung to a melody by Yair Rosenbloom. Here’s an English translation (thanks to Miri Skoriak, who also provided me with some background to the song’s history and significance):
Let the sun rise
Let the morning shine
The purest of prayers
Will not bring us back
He whose candle has been snuffed out
And was buried in the ground
Bitter tears will not wake him up
Will not bring him back
No one will resurrect us
>From the depths of darkness
Neither the victory cheer
Nor songs of praise will help
So, sing a song for peace
Don’t whisper a prayer
Better to cry aloud
A song for peace
Let the sunshine penetrate
Through the flowers
Don’t look back in worry
Let the deceased rest
Raise your eyes and
Look ahead with hope
Sing a song for love
Not for wars
Don’t say the day will come
Make it happen now
It’s not a dream
When in all quarters
The praise for peace will sound
So, sing a song for peace
Don’t whisper a prayer
Better to cry aloud
A song for peace
It really is a song for peace, as if sung by the deceased (i.e. a plea from the grave) to the next generation to pursue peace. The dead are asking the living to concentrate on the future (rather than on the past and the victims) and not be afraid to express their wishes for peace strongly. Aloud. Just like Rabin did! Rabin had placed the song sheet in his breast pocket just a few moments before the assassin’s bullet passed right through it. When I saw the song sheet (which had been reproduced in the newspaper upside down) I said to myself “That is my canvas.” I kept the cutting and from that moment on started working on the portrait in my mind, collecting material along the way.
As an aside, in 2014 I was teaching at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre in West Palm Beach, Florida, at the same time that eminent Israeli photographer, David Rubinger, was exhibiting there and I saw the same photograph of the bloodied song sheet that had inspired this portrait so many years before. It turned out that Rubinger had been called in the morning after the assassination to photograph the song sheet taken from Rabin’s pocket.
If you look carefully at the photograph below you’ll see not only his photograph of the song sheet but, on the left in the background, a portion of his photograph showing paratroopers looking at the Western Wall after reaching it in the 1967 Six Day War, a war in which Rabin played a crucial role as Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces.
I drew a portrait of Rubinger which you can see here.
A few months after the assassination I was asked to submit an image for an exhibition at the headquarters of Scitex in Herzlia, Israel. I knew this was the image and started work on completing the portrait. Scitex made the Iris inkjet printer (originally designed as a proofing printer for the commercial print industry) used in the 1990s by myself and other artists exploring the then-new medium of digital paint.
The symbols and elements in the collage include the crowds who were at the rally where Rabin was killed, the hand-shake with Yasir Arafat that broke the years of enmity and hate, the Western Wall pockmarked with bullet holes just after the Six Day War in 1967, and a photo of Rabin age 18 taken in 1940 when he was involved with the underground fight against the British mandate in Palestine. The Israeli flag flying at half mast, with the fatal bullet hole passing through it, is a metaphor for the way the bullet that killed Rabin also ripped a hole through the fabric of Israeli society.
I presented a Scitex Iris print of this portrait (printed courtesy of the Image House, Santa Fe) to Rabin’s widow, Leah Rabin, in January, 1998, just before she gave a speech in Cupertino, CA. She looked at it in silence and then said:”Those eyes..”
This web page is dedicated to the memory of Yitzhak Rabin and to the hope that peace will prevail. I also dedicate this page to the memory of Leah Rabin who shared her husbands ideals and who sadly passed away a couple of years after I presented her with the print.
This artwork was created on a Macintosh 9500/132, using a Wacom graphics tablet & pressure sensitive stylus, and Fractal Design Painter 4.0 software, and then printed onto specially treated canvas using archival pigment inks.
Jim Brickman Transitions, 1995, 39 seconds
This portrait movie Paintermation™ was created for Jim Brickman’s recording label at the time, Windham Hill Records. The music you hear in the video is Angel Eyes. The stages of this movie show different views of Brickman as he plays piano. It was created by recording the transitions of a single painting process using Fractal Design Painter, Macintosh IIfx and Wacom tablet.
This portrait of the founder of Electronic Arts was created from life in Palo Alto in 1992, the “early days” of my digital painting. I used a Mac IIfx with Wacom graphics tablet and PixelPaint Pro software to create this.
Eddy Wynschenk
San Francisco 1989
Oil pastel, gouache and Xerox transfer on BFK Rives watercolor paper
22″ x 30″
In 1989, after arriving in America the year before, I came across an article that featured Holocaust survivor Eddy Wynschenk. I immediately wanted to draw his portrait and contacted him through the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, the archives of which are now housed in the Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS) Holocaust Center and Tauber Holocaust Library in San Francisco. I subsequently was introduced to other survivors who I drew, and volunteered to conduct some of the Holocaust oral history interviews. With all the years that have passed since I made these five portraits, over thirty years ago, they remain the most important portraits I have drawn, each a visual testimony to survival and to strength and a reminder of how important it is to never take for granted the peace, freedom and life we have.
Eddy was born 1927 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He spent the period 1943 – 1945 in five different camps: Vught, Westerbork, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Fuerstengrubbe and Dora-Nordhausen. Click here to watch Eddy’s video testimony in recordings from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
To draw this portrait of Eddy I came round to his home and he sat for a couple of hours while we talked (sometimes in Dutch—I’d just spent three years living in the Netherlands) and I drew him from life in one session. I did not use reference photos for any of the portraits in this series. During our sitting Eddy shared a poem, ‘Remember! Remember!’, he’d written in 1981 and a photo, taken illicitly by the SS during the arrival of Hungarian Jews in Birkenau in 1944, that he’d accidentally come across in a historical book he was given in 1987. He recognized himself in the photo: the first time he’d seen what he looked like in the camps since there were no mirrors. I used copy toner transfer techniques to add the poem (based on his type-written copy) and the photo to his portrait. When the portrait was completed I asked him to hand sign the portrait as a graphic statement of his survival.
Please scroll down to see the other portraits in the series, all drawn from life in a single sitting and each one hand signed by the survivor:
Gloria Hollander Lyon
San Francisco 1989
Oil pastel, gouache and Xerox transfer on BFK Rives watercolor paper
22″ x 30″
Gloria Hollander Lyon (formerly Hajmal Hollander) was born 1930 in Czechoslovakia. She spent the war time in the following camp locations : Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen Belsen, Braunschweig Hanover, Hamburg, Beemdorf and Ravensbruck. The ‘Camp Song’ (translated from Hungarian by Gloria) that you see in the upper right of this portrait was composed by Gloria and nine other women upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau and sung to the tune of ‘Hatikvah’. The figure on the left depicts Gloria three weeks after liberation in Sweden, growing her hair back and with a bandaged leg recovering from malnutrition. When I had completed the portrait Gloria sung the ‘Camp Song’ to me. I cried. It was one of the most moving sounds I have ever heard. You can watch Gloria’s oral history testimony from recordings made as part of the Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project (click here) and at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (click here).
Lotte Grunwald
San Francisco 1990
Oil pastel on BFK Rives watercolor paper
22″ x 30″
Lotte Grunwald (formerly Brentina Lotte Moses) was born 1915 in Frankfurt, Germany. She was in the following camps : Vucht, The Netherlands (1943); and Auschwitz-Birkenau and small workcamps (1944). Was liberated by the Swedish Red Cross in April, 1945. Click here to watch Lotte’s video testimony in recordings from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Michael Hollander
San Francisco 1990
Oil pastel on BFK Rives watercolor paper
22″ x 30″
Michael Hollander was born 1923 in Czechoslovakia. He spent the war time in camps in the following locations : Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Dora-Nordhausen and Hartzg.
Jolana Hollander
San Francisco 1991
Oil pastel on BFK Rives watercolor paper
22″ x 30″
Jolana Hollander was born 1928 in Vari, Czechoslovakia. She spent the war time in the following camp locations : Auschwitz-Birkenau, Breszhinka, Malhov, Tauho and Ravensbruk. Click here to listen to an audio recording of Jolana’s testimony from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
This series was exhibited in 1992 at the Berkeley Richmond Jewish Community Center (BRJCC). This was the statement I wrote at the time to accompany the exhibition:
“HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS
A Series of Portraits by Jeremy D. Sutton
My passion for drawing people and my awareness of being Jewish have both been important parts of my life. However it was not until my father died in 1988 that a specifically Jewish theme emerged in my artwork. His death drove home the realization that if it were not for my parents being in England during World War II, rather than in Continental Europe, I may not be alive today.
About six months after my father’s death, I drew the first portrait in the series, that of Eddy Wynschenk. I had seen his photograph in the Northern California Jewish Bulletin and immediately wanted to draw him, to portray the intensity and sadness expressed in his eyes. I was subsequently introduced to other Survivors by the Holocaust Oral History Project. This exhibit includes five portraits. All the portraits were drawn from life in single sittings usually lasting about two hours. They are primarily oil pastel, some with gouache and Xerox transfer, and are all on 30” by 22” BFK Rives watercolor paper. In some of the portraits I have included images and poems relating to the particular subjects’ own experiences during the war.
For me the people in these portraits represent a living link with a passage of history where the scale of man’s inhumanity to man surpassed all comprehension, where the millions who did not survive would also have been ordinary people living out their lives.
At the same time as beginning this series, I also began to help as an interviewer for the Holocaust Oral History Project. Both drawing the portraits and conducting interviews have been emotionally difficult : trying to imagine how it could be possible for one person to hate another, to participate in such evil, simply because the other person happens to be Jewish, or of any particular persuasion or ethnicity.
I see these portraits as being part of the record of what occurred, a visual testimony to the survivors.
Jeremy D. Sutton 1992”
The five portraits shown on this page are in the chronological sequence in which I drew them, from Eddy first to Jolana last.