Tim Sunderman
San Francisco Bay Area, California
I've had a lifelong compulsion to render through my hands those things that held my fascination. And many things held my fascination. Likewise, I explored many different avenues of media and techniques. By my early teens I was focused keenly on quill pen ink drawing, trying my hand at meticulous detail committing each mark from a tightrope where no eraser could create a safety net. These skills would provide a firm base from which I would launch into other media, but I always regarded oil paint as the apex of visual art, so with a degree of trepidation, began that direction.
When I started college, my academic interests were as broad as my artistic interests, and from the outside, my pursuits may have been perceived as directionless. But I was always confident in the continuity of my direction. I started at Penn State as a forest science and then chemistry major. I continued toward my chemistry degree at the University of Pittsburgh but knew enough to realize that there was more to learn beyond science as I pursued a major in philosophy. But I also was aware that science and philosophy were only two legs of a tripod that required art to be complete. These three disciplines are one and the same human voice and so I completed my BFA at the Academy of Art in San Francisco in 1988 with my focus on oil painting and figurative art.
I had spent much time visually asking what is art, knowing at the outset that is an answerless question, but one that deserves contemplation nonetheless. At its broad base, art is a reflection on what it is to be human, and though that takes infinite forms, I have come to the point of view that the human body is the core visual representation of what it is to be human, and the river of this realization continues to be, for me, inexhaustible.
In the year after I graduated from the Academy I became a full time college art instructor and eventually the Director of Education of a small art college in San Francisco. This would continue for 24 years while I concurrently worked on private art commissions and freelance work. I went on to design for Apple, Razorfish Ad Agency, and other tech firms in Bay Area.
But my personal creative pursuits never faltered as I continued with figurative art and broadened my creative avenues with brief forays into bronze and clay sculpture and experimental photographic printing techniques. Yet the smell of oil paint was never far away and has always been my greatest ally.