David Christopher Newton was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, draftsman, and college art teacher. Newton was born in 1953 in Oakland, California. He lived and worked in California, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and North Carolina with his wife Suzanne McBride Newton. He died in 2011 after battling colon and liver cancer.
Art Career and Education
Newton began studying painting and drawing in the 1970s with Scott Halem in San Francisco. Newton moved to New York City in 1978 to study painting and drawing in the studio of Frank Herbert Mason at the Art Students League of New York. Newton met his future wife, Suzanne McBride Newton, when she modeled for a painting in the Mason class at The League. In addition to The Art Students League of New York, Newton also studied art at Pratt Graphics Center, Rhode Island School of Design, and Bard College. Newton had a lifelong desire to learn new techniques and skills to add to his artwork, be it drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpting or blacksmithing and welding. To support himself, he worked as a bartender at the Algonquin Hotel, an exhibition and design preparator at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and an art teacher in a high school and several colleges, including Guilford College All along he diligently worked at making, exhibiting, and selling his paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures.
Art Media and Style Transitions
Newton began his art career as a skilled traditional realist painter/printmaker/draftsman and over time gradually transitioned to abstraction in his sculpture and painting. Newton's preferred sculptural media were wood, metal and found objects which he used to create objects with whimsical and spiritual themes. Newton modeled wood with chisels and saws, blackened it with torches, and stained it with oils and pigments; welded and smithed metal; and in his last series of sculptures, he constructed objects based on architectural motifs. Many of his sculptural works resemble utilitarian objects, albeit functional, they are not actually utilitarian. Newton also drew and painted both figurative and landscape imagery based on observation and imagination. During the final year of his life David Newton worked on photography and drawing when he was no longer able to work on his physically demanding sculptures.
