Painting California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains

  Alan Sonneman’s artwork has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and American Embassies worldwide, an enduring artistic presence spanning the last four decades. He has devoted his practice to hyperrealist paintings of California’s High Sierra mountains and Owens Valley for most of that period of time.

  When Sonneman attended the San Francisco Art Institute starting in 1973 he had little knowledge of the mountain range known as the Sierra Nevada. Over these years he has made frequent trips into the heights of this great range of mountains to capture their beauty. Drawing from the romantic tradition of the American West depicted by the 19th-century painters Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran which he first encountered as a child visiting the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. he has built a body of work based on these observations.

  Sonneman views these paintings as a form of portraiture. He believes that representational painting can reveal more about reality and perception than photography or the naked eye. His goal is not to replicate the landscape perfectly but to convey the experience of observing it. Hiking these mountain trails every summer, Sonneman has sought out a deeper understanding of this landscape, Time and its passing is the object of observation in this work.