Jeremy Sutton

Bio: Jeremy Sutton, artist, author, educator and Corel Painter Master, is an internationally recognized authority and pioneer in the field of digital painting. He has authored six books (the most recent being Painter 11 Creativity: Digital Artist's Handbook published by Focal Press), produced instructional videos and DVDs, founded the online training web site PaintboxJ.com, exhibited his artwork internationally and been a featured platform presenter at major conferences around the world, including SIGGRAPH, Macworld (San Francisco and Tokyo), WPPI and Imaging USA. He is one of 33 Corel Painter Masters. He received the Photographic Craftsman award from the Professional Photographers of America in 2009.

Born in London, Sutton’s background combines science and art. He studied drawing, sculpture and print-making at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University 1979-82, and developed black and white photographic prints in the Pembroke College darkroom, while earning a degree in Physics. He continued to study lithography and life-drawing at the Vrije Academie in The Hague, The Netherlands. After a career in superconducting magnet sales and marketing that brought him to live in Silicon Valley in 1988, having his first one man show in the US in 1989, Sutton became a full time artist in 1994. Subjects who have sat for their portraits by Sutton include business, sports, political and philanthropic luminaries such as entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, baseball legend Willie Mays, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and software pioneer Dame Stephanie Shirley. His work has been exhibited in the Jewish Museum, San Francisco, and the Tech Museum, San Jose, (which has his work in their permanent collection). Sutton’s paintings are in public and private collections internationally.

Sutton has been teaching since 1985, when he started teaching a series of drawing workshops in the Netherlands. Since then he has taught at numerous institutions around the world, including at the San Francisco State University New Media Center, the Academy of Art University, Expression Center for New Media and the American Film Institute.

In 2010 Sutton was hired by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco to perform a tableau vivant portrayal of the impressionist painter Edgar Degas, creating drawings and paintings of ballet dancers at the de Young and Legion of Honor Museums, and subsequently to portray Vincent van Gogh, also painting in front of audiences at the de Young Museum. Sutton was commissioned by the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation to paint a 6 foot wide, 400 lb Heart, subsequently purchased by Visa, as part of the 2011 Hearts in San Francisco fundraiser. Sutton combined digital and traditional media on the Heart, which is on public display until October 2011 in Union Square, the commercial heart of San Francisco.

Sutton works across multiple media, combining photography, drawing, digital paint, acrylic, oil, collage and chin collé on canvas, creating works over a wide range of scale, from those suitable to hang in a home to those designed as large-scale wall hangings, murals and public art projects.