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Culture/cultivation: thoughts on painting the landscape
Art Journal, Winter, 1998 by Altoon Sultan
Reading these new historical perspectives made me think differently about painting the landscape, as did looking at postmodern art. I've always enjoyed looking at all kinds of art for the aesthetic pleasures and intellectual challenges it gives. Gerhard Richter's Atlas presented the world - ordinary life, political events, portraits, and places - in thousands of photographs. In this work, landscape punctuated the flow of images and questioned our longings and how we choose to represent them. With the text accompanying photographs of gorgeous landscape, Carrie Mae Weems confounds our expectation of the landscape's meaning. The violent history of a place is in disturbing contrast to its beauty.
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I had been trained in the "you paint what you see" school of thought, where formal issues such as composition and color were important and content wasn't talked about much. The complex layers of meaning disclosed in much new historical writing and contemporary art challenged my project of simple pastoral farming scenes that showed the harmony of man's work in nature. What I saw was now not so simple.
My interest in the agricultural landscape has continued, however, as the place where actual landscape is constantly being made and changed - where the conventional beauty of undulating fields framed by tree-covered hills coexists with raw power in the guise of farm machines; where unnatural nature (scientifically bred cows, hybrid crops) is raised with chemicals and helped along by mounds of plastic. A major reason that I'm such an avid gardener is that I've seen the way our food is grown in California, with artificial fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.
For Americans, farmers, along with cowboys, have been mythic figures, our "rugged individualists." But now the number of farmers is statistically insignificant, whereas when the country began, they constituted 95 percent of the population. The small family farm is now an anomaly, and large agribusinesses are the norm. Our food supply is cheap and plentiful, but at what cost to our health, soil, and water?
When I look at a farm now, all these thoughts are bumping around in my head, motivating my work - but then there's the reality of the actual stuff in front of me. And this stuff - the silos, manure piles, plastic-wrapped hay, machinery - is exciting in its monumentality and sculptural presence. The ordinary ugliness of a tractor or a mound of old tires is weirdly beautiful. I'm more and more drawn to these things in the foreground, so that at times I can hardly call myself a landscape painter.
And I'm no longer primarily a plein-air painter. Now, most of my work is done in the studio. A primary reason is that the objects that confront me, that I place smack up against the picture plane, are transient in the landscape - machinery is moved, hay is piled up and taken away, animals wander about. It became impossible to paint directly from the motif when the motif didn't sit still for three or four months.
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