Alan Sonneman

(b. 1952)

We buy and sell paintings by Alan Sonneman (b. 1952)

 
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Alan Sonneman Biography

Alan Sonneman was born in 1952 in Minnesota. He attended Northwestern University in Illinois for two years before moving to San Francisco, California, to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, graduating in 1975.

While living in San Francisco in the 1970s, he traveled to California’s High Sierra Nevada Mountain range, discovering his fascination for the grandeur and beauty of the high alpine meadows and towering majestic granite peaks.

After graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute, Sonneman moved to Washington, D.C., and spent six years working in museums and galleries in D.C. and New York City. In 1980, while in D.C, Sonneman painted a masterwork titled “The Last Washington Painting,” which depicted an atomic explosion over the skyline of Washington, D.C. The painting became widely exhibited and provided him with International recognition and news media exposure, appearing in several news publications, including the Washington Post, on multiple occasions.

Alan Sonneman returned to California in 1982 and lived in Los Angeles, where his work would be exhibited at the Ace Gallery. He also received commissions to exhibit his work at the Biltmore Hotel and Hall of Justice in Riverside, California.

In 1996, Sonneman moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area and, in addition to painting, he worked in the movie industry as a visual effects editor for Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks Studio, contributing his artistic talents to Oscar-winning movies The Titanic and What Dreams May Come.

Since Alan Sonneman’s first trips to California’s Sierra Nevada mountains in the 1970s, his enthusiasm for the beauty of the high Sierra Mountain range would impact his oeuvre throughout the rest of his life. In the later 1990s, following in the historical footsteps of some of the early California Eastern Sierra painters like Edgar Payne, Robert Clunie, Benjamin Brown, Elmer and Marion Wachtel, and many others, he began making several trips a year hiking into the higher elevations of the Eastern Sierra to gather inspiration for his artworks.

Equipped with a digital camera and modern photography techniques not available to the early California Impressionists, Alan Sonneman’s High Sierra Mountain journeys would allow him to combine the mastery of photographic composition with his resolutely painterly technique to record in detail the magnificence of California’s High Sierra Nevada mountains. Sonneman’s paintings are impressive original oil paintings in a hyperrealist style depicting grandiose Eastern Sierra peaks, cliffs, and remote wilderness landscapes.

Alan Sonneman’s artworks have been exhibited in some of the finest American art galleries and institutions and internationally in Moscow, Pakistan, and South Africa.


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