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Culture/cultivation: thoughts on painting the landscape
Art Journal, Winter, 1998 by Altoon Sultan
Another reason seems to be my move to Vermont four years ago. I bought my hilltop farmhouse during the euphoria of the mid-eighties, afterward finding that I couldn't afford it while continuing to live in New York. I took a teaching job in San Jose, California. Feeling a cultural exile there, I quit the job after three years, sold my New York loft, and moved to Vermont in 1994. Here, my work in the studio and my life are more unified. I have friends who are farmers, I'm on the town Planning Commission, and I'm the Solid Waste Supervisor (which basically means running the recycling center). An advantage of doing representational work in a small town is that my neighbors relate to and enjoy it. I'm always inside the beauty of the landscape, so my need to be outdoors painting has diminished.
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Working in the studio has allowed me to travel, collecting images of agriculture from around the country. Changes in topography and weather create conditions for different kinds of crops - soybeans in Iowa, sugar cane in Louisiana - which in turn need different implements for their cultivation. It's exciting to deal with this variety of subject matter.
Then there's the freedom from naturalism that comes from studio work. I feel myself to be solidly in the American tradition of what Barbara Novak describes as conceptual realism: "abstract knowledge is fortified by the stuff of empiricism . . . . the object, as it were, presents itself, and the result is a higher coefficient of reality, making the real somehow more real."(5) At times I feel like a primitive, trying to make the things I paint tangible. The thrill of the working process comes from this conjuring up of the real.
About ten years ago, I began to make landscape paintings in the studio during my winters in New York. I'd had enough experience in working directly from the motif to complete a painting using color studies and black-and-white photographs done at the site. For the past two years, I have worked exclusively this way. When I find an interesting image, I set up my easel and paint a small color sketch in oil or, since last summer, in gouache. (Gouache gives a crisper and more luminous study.) At the same time, I take black-and-white photographs of the scene. The photographs become my notations of detail, and the painted studies describe color, light, and air. I do not use color film because I want my color sense and memory to have precedence over chemical color. And why not simply take photographs instead of painting? Painting is in my blood - I take deep sensual pleasure in it.
Certain images have the structure of simple large-scale forms that translate into large oil paintings; other images become small egg temperas. This choice is pretty much gut instinct, though. The different body relationships that I and the viewer have to these large- or intimate-sized works interests me. They require a different physical activity in their making; the oils, though precise, are more gestural, while the egg temperas are painstaking and meditative.
