Last week when I was teaching at the photographic workshop in New England (see my last blog entry), I had the honor of meeting painter Jeremy Sutton (JeremySutton.com). He too was there to teach a course at the workshop, but his was on painting.
As both of us were instructors, we arrived a day early to get set up and have dinner together and with the other instructors and the NEIPP staff. I had never met him before, but knew his name and had seen some of his DVDs years ago. I was excited to finally meet him.
As we talked, we were both excited about the fact that we both had the same fresh approach and philosophies to creativity. Though we use different mediums and have different terminology to explain it, it was fun to find that they were so similar.
I’ve dubbed my creative philosophy and style, “Jazz Photography,” based on me being a jazz musician before becoming a photographer, and using the same approaches from playing jazz to creating photographs — that is having a high technical background but being able to block the technical thinking, allowing that part to function perfunctorily in the background in order to really be able to improv and be creative.
Jeremy, being a painter with a strong technical background, uses a similar approach, pulling on his love of jazz music and his background of swing dancing, relating it all to his individual brushstrokes. He even listens to jazz and talks about dancing as he paints.
Jeremy had an idea of combining our groups one night for about 30 minutes in order to talk about the similarities of our creative processes despite the differences in mediums. He decided that doing a live portrait would work best for this, and I was honored to have him chose me to paint. This image above is Jeremy painting me live.
It was quite an experience to be painted live. As you can see from this image above, he lit me with some consistent and directional light (the lamp) and is working digitally with a digital pad and pen (called a Cintique’, $2000) that is pressure and directionally sensitive. His work can be seen on the projector behind us.
He worked very abstractly, laying down colors and shapes that didn’t look like me or a person at all, but instead were swirls of color and shape, both positive and negative. The entire process only took 20 minutes, and near the end it began to come together where we could all see the face emerge from the abstract.
I am extremely pleased with the painting. Here is the final result:
I absolutely love this! As an artist, I find it incredibly interesting and very artistic. I love the use of color, the shapes, and the loose feeling of the brushstrokes as well. This was not created from a photo reference, but live, right in front of me. It was an incredible gift!
Being a musician, I love to write and record in my free time. This to me looks like an album cover for a future CD! I think I have a new project on my hands. 🙂
As my current clients know, I’ve offered painted portraits on canvas for many years using a portrait I create as a reference. Some of these can be seen in past entries on this blog (here is one example, or type “painting” into the search bar near the top of my blog to see more examples from the past).
However, I am hoping to learn and incorporate more of Jeremy’s style and techniques into my work to be an even better painter artist. I’m excited for what that will bring to my work.
Thank you Jeremy!
Until next time, America!
— Bry