Alan Sonneman

Alan Sonneman (b. 1952). Artist, Painter of the California Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Born and raised on the Mississippi River in Minnesota, Alan Sonneman grew up outdoors. He attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, for two years before graduating from The San Francisco Art Institute in 1975. While in San Fransisco in the 1970s, Sonneman first experienced the high basins of California's Sierra Nevada mountains, visiting Cathedral Lake in early October with a classmate from Los Angeles.

  Moving to Washington, DC, after graduation, he spent six years working for museums and galleries in DC and NYC. This provided him with access to some of the curators and gallerists who, at the time, were bringing American 19th-century landscape painting back to the forefront of American art history. In 1980, he blended the old with the new by juxtaposing an atomic explosion over the skyline of our nation's capital to create "The Last Washington Painting." This gave him international recognition and the painting became one of the most recognized in the last 50 years in DC, appearing in the Washington Post several times and in many other exhibitions and publications.

  Returning to California in 1982, he settled into the contemporary art scene of downtown Los Angeles. During these years, his work took a historical bent, showing at the prestigious Ace Gallery and having significant commissions for the Biltmore Hotel and the new Hall of Justice in Riverside, CA. He spent much of the 1990s working in visual effects for the film industry, contributing to the Oscar winning movies Titanic and What Dreams May Come. Moving to Palo Alto in 1996, he spent four years working for Steven Spielberg's company DreamWorks.

  By the late 1990s, he returned to California's Sierra Nevada, making two to three trips a year into the high country. Using a camera to record his observations for later studio work, Sonneman began a series of paintings of the majestic Sierra Nevada mountains. Approaching the Sierra Nevada from the Owens Valley, which provides quick yet steep access to the pristine lakes and broad basins, he would linger here, watching the light as thunderstorms often rose high above California's highest peaks. Many artists have been drawn to the more accessible canyons of the Sierra, but none have ventured into the highest elevations in the way Sonneman has.

  Alan Sonneman's work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Katzen Center at American University in Washington, DC; The Southwest Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA and The Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, CA. His work has also been featured in the Washington Post, the Washington Star, the Washington City Paper, the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian UK. He has received grants and fellowships from the Neddie Marie Jones Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Sequoia Parks Foundation.