Alice Warnecke Sutro has always looked to the land for inspiration. The rugged Warnecke Ranch, a 265-acre property in Sonoma’s Chalk Hill region with over a mile of frontage along the Russian River, has been in her family for six generations. The ranch is the place that feeds her soul, she says — the place where she can be the best version of herself.
“It’s why I manage the vineyard, make the wine and do the work. It’s all about the connection to the ranch.”
Growing up, the river was a peaceful place to swim and explore. Now, she takes her two children there to do the same. “It’s so beautiful down there. It’s imprinted in my mind as the most energizing place I can go.”
Alice — a grapegrower, winemaker and visual artist — studied art history at Stanford. She once held one of those student jobs that seem to only exist in the movies: maintaining works of art in the university’s outdoor sculpture garden. While soaping down a priceless Rodin bronze, she realized she was drawn to explore the places that had been home to the great artists she loved. Being able to touch and experience art in person was grounding to her artistic practice. Alice later lived and worked in Florence and Moscow before returning to the Bay Area’s California College of the Arts for a master’s degree in fine arts.
It was in graduate school that the young artist experienced a bit of a creative crisis. A professor had questioned aspects of her work, and she retreated to the family ranch to regroup. Alice found herself sitting on the ground, with her drawing paper beneath her, inside a large pigeon coop. Looking up at dozens of white pigeons, which had been raised on the ranch for 30 years, she simply began to draw what she saw.
“It’s hard to draw a bird because they always move. It was exciting, drawing faster and looser. Letting go of control made me more creative, exploratory and adventurous — and then the line in my work didn’t seem stale,” she says.
Today, Alice continues that freely given expression, and has become known for life-size figurative line drawings as well as live art performances. She likens the performances to drawing under pressure — a concept she explores in the tradition of artists like Niki de Saint Phalle, one of her creative inspirations.
At Healdsburg’s Gallery Lulo, where she first explored the concept of live drawing, she’d sit in the gallery and invite people off the street to step inside, where she would draw them live and then give away digital copies of the portraits to the subjects.
“I don’t think museums are always the best places for art. They make it rare and inaccessible,” she says, pointing out that long ago, art was a form of ritual and often didn’t culminate in a single, stand-alone work.
Last summer, Alice created a monumental outdoor piece set in an olive grove at Petaluma’s McEvoy Ranch. Her “I’m On a Roll” mural spooled out in one 100-foot-long roll of paper, with 20 life-size portraits of real-life people, solicited on the spot and drawn in a span of 12 hours — an experience she likens to running a marathon, as she dug deep for the physical strength and focus to finish the work.
“I was looking at subject matter and drawing, so my brain was working there. While talking to them, I was an active listener and active in the conversation and tried to remember things about them, but then I was also aware of the people around me. They are my audience, also.”
The live performance aspect of her art creates a deep connection with people.
“At the heart of my projects, there is always a person-to-person interaction,” she says. “Drawing from life gives my line a certain quality and helps make my work look how I want it to.”
Her recent installation, “Mistress of Memory,” at Healdsburg’s Harmon Guest House plays with the concept of hotels as transitive spaces, featuring life-size figurative drawings of women holding balloons over their bodies. Alice created art for six guest suites, as well as a large mural in the hotel restaurant — all accompanied by a flash-fiction writing project where hotel guest are invited to interpret the works. It’s a narrative, she explains, about making, and perhaps losing, memories.
“I like to open up my practice to other people. I think of it more like theater, like having a director or set producer.”
But drawing under such intense circumstances can take a toll. She utilizes her ranch as a place to recuperate “before getting back out there.” Her small, rambling studio, filled with family antiques and artifacts from around the ranch, was once used by her father, a landscape architect, as a drawing studio. It smells of the redwood from which it was built.
Alice says the studio is a place to look inward and work privately on smaller art pieces as well as short stories for an upcoming book.
“The internal work balances the public-facing part of the art,” she explains.
In late summer and early fall, Alice’s art takes a back seat to her duties as a rancher, grapegrower and winemaker. Alice and her aunt, Margo Warnecke Merck, manage an 80-acre vineyard, which produces some 350 tons of grapes that they sell to labels like Decoy, Matanzas Creek and Herzog. Alice holds back an additional 20 tons of fruit for her own label, SUTRO Wine Co. Her favorite fruit to work with is Cabernet Sauvignon, she says. “It’s the variety that can do the most. I love the grippiness and bitter taste.”
“I do often think about tannins as deep shadows on a painting.”
With a heavy harvest workload, Alice typically pauses larger works for a few months. Though, she keeps a list of musings and ideas close at hand and manages to create some time to write. She also occasionally uses an app on her iPad to “finish the stories” on drawings that are not yet complete. But the time away from more ambitious projects is another chance to recharge.
“I like that distance from it. I get reinvigorated to return to art-making with the seasons.”
Ever the farmer, with the promise of the future in mind, Alice is hopeful that this fall’s harvest will be the best vintage ever. After all, she says, “All farmers are idealistic romantics at heart.”
Alice Warnecke Sutro’s installations will be on display at Harmon Guest House through September, and she is also currently at work on a new exhibition at Escolar on the Santa Rosa Junior College campus in November. For more information, visit alicesutro.com. To shop Alice’s wines, including a crisp Sauvignon Blanc as well as her favorite Cabernet Sauvignon from Warnecke Ranch, visit sutrowine.com.