David Suter (artist)

Last updated
David Suter
Born1949 (age 74–75)
Bethesda, Maryland
Nationality American
Known for Illustration, Painting, Sculpture

David Suter (born 1949) [1] is an American artist known for his many years producing editorial illustrations for clients such as The Washington Post , Time , and The New York Times . Known as "Suterisms" [2] or "visual koans", [3] his illustrations are notable for their use of bistable perception, in which Suter combines multiple images and concepts into a single image. [2] Suter is also an accomplished fine art painter and sculptor.

Contents

Biography and illustration career

Suter grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, the son of Richard Sturgis Suter, who worked in the CIA, and Angela Phillips Suter, an artist. He was influenced early on by the mathematically inspired work of M. C. Escher, [1] but never had any formal art training. [2]

Suter attended a number of different colleges, not graduating from any of them. [1] Drafted into the Army during the Vietnam War, he spent his deployment in West Germany. [1]

Upon returning to the U.S., Suter got work at The Washington Post as an illustrator, for a while working as a courtroom artist during the Watergate scandal trials. [4]

Suter was awarded a Michigan Journalism Fellowship in 1977, where he spent a year studying fine art, philosophy, and history [5] at the University of Michigan. Upon completion of the fellowship, in 1978, Suter moved to New York City to pursue editorial illustration full-time. He quickly become sought-after by such publications as The New York Times (both on the op-ed page and the book review), Time magazine (for whom he did a number of covers), Harper's Magazine , and the Chicago Tribune . [3]

In a mid-1980s magazine profile, Suter described his work this way:

I don't think of them as puns. I like to think of them as equations. Every story suggests a certain number of images. And then there are other images, the visual clichés that are in everybody's mind and sort of make up their mental scenery, like the Pentagon, the Statue of Liberty, or the Cross. My mind is like a slot machine: You pull the lever and eventually one of the images from the article comes to rest next to a cliché that looks something like it. . . . It's a little like algebra. I try to combine the two images through a process of finding similarities and canceling out dissimilar aspects. [2]

For many years, Suter has been working on creating a full-length animation of the complete text of Shakespeare's Hamlet . [1] [6]

In the late 2000s he retired from editorial illustration to work full-time on his painting and sculpture practices.

Fine art

The first exhibition of Suter's fine art—which he terms "Constructivist Expressionist" [4] —was in 1996 at the Morgan Rank Gallery in East Hampton, New York. [1]

In 2011, he was arrested and detained in Serbia while transporting his paintings from France to Romania for a gallery show in Bucharest. [7] [8]

Personal life

Suter has four daughters: Valerie, Georgia, Charlotte, and Olivia.

Quotes

If it had been possible to graft M.C. Escher onto David Low, we might have had David Suter before now. Which is to say, an artist who can turn a political thought inside out and show you its cortical illusions. — Tom Wolfe [2]

He doesn't simply create a striking accompaniment to the text, like most of my artists. His method actually transforms the author's argument into a new visual symbol. . . . No one can do them like him. — Jerelle Kraus, long-time art director of The New York Times op-ed page [2]

Even his mediocre things are good, and his best things are brilliant. — Steven Heller [2]

In some cases David gets to the essence of a subject more quickly and economically than the writer. If people say it's visual trickery, it's bloody good visual trickery. His work will stand up. — Nigel Holmes [2]

Bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">M. C. Escher</span> Dutch graphic artist (1898–1972)

Maurits Cornelis Escher was a Dutch graphic artist who made woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, many of which were inspired by mathematics. Despite wide popular interest, for most of his life Escher was neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the late twentieth century, he became more widely appreciated, and in the twenty-first century he has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Illustrator</span> Artist enhancing writing with images

An illustrator is an artist who specializes in enhancing writing or elucidating concepts by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text or idea. The illustration may be intended to clarify complicated concepts or objects that are difficult to describe textually, which is the reason illustrations are often found in children's books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Nessim</span> American artist, illustrator and educator

Barbara Nessim is an American artist, illustrator, and educator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. C. Leyendecker</span> German-American illustrator

Joseph Christian Leyendecker was one of the most prominent and financially successful freelance commercial artists in the U.S. He was active between 1895 and 1951 producing drawings and paintings for hundreds of posters, books, advertisements, and magazine covers and stories. He is best known for his 80 covers for Collier's Weekly, 322 covers for The Saturday Evening Post, and advertising illustrations for B. Kuppenheimer men's clothing and Arrow brand shirts and detachable collars. He was one of the few known gay artists working in the early-twentieth century U.S.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gary Baseman</span> American contemporary artist

Gary Baseman is an American artist, cartoonist, and animator who investigates history, heritage, and the human condition. Through iconography and visual narratives that celebrate “the beauty of the bittersweetness of life,” his work brings together the worlds of popular culture and fine art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">McClelland Barclay</span> American illustrator

McClelland Barclay was an American illustrator. By the age of 21, Barclay's work had been published in The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies' Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan. He was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve in 1938 and following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he went on active duty. At the time of his death, in 1943, he was a Lt. Commander.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Longo</span> New York-based artist, filmmaker, and musician.

Robert Longo is an American artist, filmmaker, photographer and musician.

Events from the year 1972 in art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Levine</span> American caricaturist (1926–2009)

David Levine was an American artist and illustrator best known for his caricatures in The New York Review of Books. Jules Feiffer has called him "the greatest caricaturist of the last half of the 20th Century".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lee Brown Coye</span> American artist

Lee Brown Coye was an American artist.

Brad Holland is an American artist. His work has appeared in Time, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Playboy, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and many other national and international publications. His paintings have been exhibited in museums around the world, including one-man exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Clermont-Ferrand, France and the Museum of American Illustration, New York City.

Anita E. Kunz, OC, DFA, RCA is a Canadian-born artist and illustrator. She was the first woman and first Canadian to have a solo exhibit at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry Anderson (artist)</span> American illustrator and painter

Joseph Harry Anderson was an American illustrator and a member of the Illustrator's Hall of Fame. A devout Seventh-day Adventist artist, he is best known for Christian-themed illustrations he painted for the Adventist church and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was also a popular illustrator of short stories in American weekly magazines during the 1930s and early 1940s.

Tim O'Brien is an American artist who works in a realistic style. His illustrations have appeared on the covers and interior pages of magazines such as Time, Rolling Stone, GQ, Esquire, National Geographic, Der Spiegel, and others. His illustrations are also used by the US Postal Service for postage stamps.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joel Resnicoff</span>

Joel Hirsch Resnicoff was an American artist and fashion illustrator, who incorporated expressionistic art into commercial fashion illustrations, stating his belief that "commercial art is the art of the century."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Victor Stabin</span> American painter

Victor Stabin is an American artist, "eco-surrealist" painter, author and illustrator. He is noted for his work in education and has used his book Daedal Doodle as a teaching tool in several schools, an endeavor sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Marshall Arisman was an American illustrator, painter, storyteller, and educator.

Edel Rodriguez is a Cuban American artist, illustrator, and children's book author. Using a variety of materials, his work ranges from conceptual to portraiture and landscape. Socialist propaganda and western advertising, island culture, and contemporary city life, are all aspects of his life that inform his work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Horacio Cardo</span> Argentine painter and illustrator (1944–2018)

Horacio Fidel Cardo was a painter and illustrator from Argentina.

Jerelle Kraus is an American art director, artist, and writer.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Lyman, Rick. "FILM: Rendering 'Hamlet' With Pen in Hand," New York Times (July 27, 1997).
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Van Biema, David H. "Look Twice! Illustrator David Suter Uses Visual Puns to Make His Points," People Vol. 24, No. 21 (November 18, 1985).
  3. 1 2 "Current Issue," 3x3 Magazine. Accessed Dec. 2, 2015.
  4. 1 2 Jenkins, Mark. "Style: Painter and sculpter [sic] David Suter’s homespun art at Gallery A," The Washington Post (November 17, 2011).
  5. ↑ "Past Fellows: 1977–1978," Archived 2015-10-28 at the Wayback Machine Knight-Wallace Fellows at Michigan website. Accessed Dec. 2, 2015.
  6. ↑ Kraus, Jerelle. All the Art That's Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn't): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page (Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 82.
  7. ↑ Heller, Steven. "David Suter Detained in Serbia," Print magazine (November 22, 2011).
  8. ↑ Jenkins, Mark. "Style: Serbian authorities detain D.C. artist, gallery owner, seize dozens of artworks," The Washington Post (November 21, 2011).
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.