American Artist Alan Sonneman

Sonneman states; “Vision is a complex process, our eyes are more like a camera lens than a process of representation of impressions rendered by hand. It’s how we see the world, we don’t see generalizations, we see an endless perception of things that we have learned to categorize and arrange in hierarchies of subjects. A high level of detail in my work is important to be immersed in my paintings, to feel present in the scene I’m depicting.”  This takes a lot of time to create this correctly. My largest paintings take up to a year to complete.

In the beginning, he carried a medium-format film camera, a trip might yield 100 images on film that would have to be scanned. Starting in 2007 Sonneman began using a full-frame 35mm digital camera. He now could take 2 or 3 thousand images on a trip, later stitching together dozens of images to create highly detailed files to work from. This completely changed his approach to painting. “This gives me a level of detail film was incapable of, I’m not copying a photograph, rather I’m re-presenting an experience I’ve witnessed using photographic documentation I collected at the time”.