Vonn Cummings Sumner (born 1976 in

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was ...

) is an internationally exhibited American painter. He received his Bachelor of Arts, in 1998 and Master of Fine Arts, Painting in 2000, both from the

University of California, Davis The University of California, Davis (UC Davis, UCD, or Davis) is a public land-grant research university near Davis, California. Named a Public Ivy, it is the northernmost of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The inst ...

, where he studied with, among others, the celebrated American painter and educator

Wayne Thiebaud Morton Wayne Thiebaud ( ; November 15, 1920 – December 25, 2021) was an American painter known for his colorful works depicting commonplace objects—pies, lipsticks, paint cans, ice cream cones, pastries, and hot dogs—as well as for his la ...

. Sumner's work has been the subject of two solo Museum exhibitions the first having been at the

Riverside Art Museum Riverside Art Museum is an art museum in the historic Mission Inn District of Riverside, California. The museum is a non-profit organization which focuses on addressing social issues and offers art classes as well as other events in order to in ...

Riverside, California Riverside is a city in and the county seat of Riverside County, California, United States, in the Inland Empire metropolitan area. It is named for its location beside the Santa Ana River. It is the most populous city in the Inland Empire and ...

in 2008 and then at the Phillips Museum of Art at

Franklin and Marshall Franklin & Marshall College (F&M) is a private liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It employs 175 full-time faculty members and has a student body of approximately 2,400 full-time students. It was founded upon the merger of Fran ...

College in

Lancaster, Pennsylvania Lancaster, ( ; pdc, Lengeschder) is a city in and the county seat of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It is one of the oldest inland cities in the United States. With a population at the 2020 census of 58,039, it ranks 11th in population among ...

in 2011. He is known for his metaphorical figurative paintings, often with a muted color palette. The arts writer John Seed, writing in the Huffington Post in 2013 described Sumner's work this way: umner'spaintings that form a kind of personal

Commedia dell'Arte (; ; ) was an early form of professional theatre, originating from Italian theatre, that was popular throughout Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. It was formerly called Italian comedy in English and is also known as , , and . Charac ...

, whose main actor has a tragic, muted air. Sumner is wise enough to know how to engage you in his theater and also smart enough to stand back and let you react on your own terms. The paintings are generous, funny and just a bit opaque... Echoes of Bay Area painting, flavors gleaned from Morandi, Guston and Magritte and a hint of Buster Keaton come together in his recent works through the filter of a sly, discerning intelligence." Sumner was involved in a dialogue with artist Shane Guffogg and others in the non-profit space, Pharmaka in Downtown Los Angeles. Pharmaka began as a dialogue among Sumner, Shane Guffogg, John Scane, and art dealer, Adam Gross about the current state of contemporary art. Sumner is represented by the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in

Los Angeles Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the wor ...

. He is a professor of painting at Fullerton College.

References

Living people 20th-century American painters People from Palo Alto, California 1976 births University of California, Davis alumni 21st-century American painters {{US-painter-stub